The Mirror Before Her

Chapter One: Before Her

Some people say loneliness is loud.

But mine was quiet.

A silence so constant, it became a rhythm I lived by.

Most days, I wake up before the alarm. Not because I was eager to start the day, but because my body had memorized survival. Wake up. Go to work. Code. Go home. Sleep. Repeat.

I didn’t mind the solitude. I convinced myself that I liked it.

There were brief flickers of something more—women I almost loved, moments I almost reached for—but they never stayed. Or maybe I never let them. Maybe I only ever loved what I could leave.

I had my reasons. And most of them wore my name like a bruise.

I moved to Makati six months before I met her. It was supposed to be a fresh start. A new job, a quieter city life, away from everything that made me forget who I was.

Lumina Content Solutions hired me as a backend developer. They didn’t ask many questions. Just gave me a desk, a headset, and deadlines. I liked that. I liked disappearing into code. There were no expectations there, no faces to decode, no words that meant the opposite of what they said.

At lunch, I ate alone. At meetings, I spoke only when spoken to.

They called me “the quiet one.”

I let them.

But at night, it was different.

At night, the dreams came.

They always started the same way—a long hallway, soft light, the scent of jasmine in the air. And then she would appear.

A woman with a face I couldn’t name. Eyes I couldn’t forget.

Sometimes, she wore a white hanbok embroidered with gold. Other times, a modern dress or a cloak I swore belonged to another century. Always her. Always the same ache in my chest.

She never spoke. But she always looked back at me as if I’d broken something we both once believed in.

I would wake up gasping. Heart racing. Her name is just out of reach.

It haunted me.

She haunted me.

I started sketching her face in the margins of my notebook. Brows furrowed. Lips parted. Like she was always on the verge of telling me something important. Something I used to know.

I told myself it was just my brain playing tricks.

But part of me knew better.

I didn’t believe in fate. Not really. But I believed in signs. And I kept seeing her in every face I passed. For weeks. Until that day, I stepped into that elevator and stood across from her.

And this time…

She wasn’t in a dream.