A city disappears from the map overnight—tell the story from someone who remembers it.

I remember the city like a pulse beneath my skin, a heartbeat everyone else seems to have forgotten.

Yesterday, it was alive. The market on Alder Row smelled of fresh bread and roasting spices, thick with laughter and the clang of bicycles against iron racks. Streetlights flickered in their familiar rhythm. The river at the edge of town caught the sun like molten gold, and fog curled through alleys like fingers reaching for something lost. Every corner, every crack in the sidewalks, every whisper of the wind felt like home.

This morning… it was gone.

I walked where streets should have been. There were no streets, no buildings, no shadows. Just an endless gray haze that pressed against my chest like a living thing. I called my friends. No one answered. Their numbers didn’t exist. Their faces were gone from every record, every photograph, every screen. It was as if the city—and everyone in it—had been erased from the world, leaving me alone in a place that never was.

But I remember.

I remember the bookstore on Mariner’s Way, where ink and dust smelled like magic. I remember the café on Cedar and Hollow, where the barista knew my order before I spoke, and sometimes slipped a chocolate into my hand with a conspiratorial grin. I remember the hum of the streetlights at night, the faint clatter of dishes from upstairs apartments, the way the wind carried echoes of lives that shouldn’t be gone.

I can see the clock tower in the square, its hands frozen at 7:03. I can hear the whispers of the city calling me back through the void. Every time I step toward it, the ground dissolves into mist beneath my feet.

I don’t know what erased it. Sometimes I tell myself it never existed, that it was some cruel accident of memory. Other times… I feel it was deliberate. Something beyond comprehension looked at this city—my city—and decided it had no right to be.

I wander the emptiness alone, aching for invisible streets, for the laughter stolen with the wind, for the river that still runs somewhere I cannot reach. I ache for the warmth of a life that feels like a dream slipping through my fingers.

I clutch the memory like a fragile, burning ember in the darkness. If remembering it is all that keeps me tethered to what was real, then I will remember it forever. Even if it leaves me hollow. Even if it leaves me broken.

I am the last witness.
And in its absence, I am haunted.