short fiction · 2026-10-30

The Notebook's Thirteen Forgotten Loves

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

The notebook sat in the drawer for seventeen years, its leather cover cracked at the spine where fingers had once traced the same line daily. Inside, thirteen names were written in ink that had faded from black to the color of dried tea. She found it while clearing her mother's house after the funeral, the notebook tucked between a cookbook and a stack of unpaid bills.

The first name: Thomas, who left for the sea and never wrote back. The second: Elena, who married a baker in Lyon and sent one postcard smelling of lavender. The third: Marcus, who died of fever in a trench she could not pronounce. Each name had a date beside it, and a single line — a color, a scent, a fragment of conversation. Thomas: the smell of salt on wool. Elena: the way she laughed at her own reflection. Marcus: the sound of rain on canvas.

She read them all in one sitting, the afternoon light turning gold then gray across the kitchen table. By the thirteenth — Julian: the taste of peaches in July — her fingers trembled. These were not her loves. They were her mother's, recorded in a hand she recognized from birthday cards and grocery lists.

The notebook had no ending. The last page was blank, waiting for a fourteenth name that never came. She closed it, pressed it to her chest, and understood: her mother had not forgotten them. She had kept them safe, one by one, in the only vessel that would not betray them — paper that asked nothing, judged nothing, simply held.

Now the notebook sits on her own desk. She has not added a name. She is waiting to understand what it means to love someone enough to write them down, and then let the ink fade.