The world vibrated with emotions Elara could see. Joy was a dandelion-yellow shimmer, fleeting as fluff on the wind. Anger was a hard, crimson shellac. Grief, however, was the baseline, the city’s constant hum. It manifested as a smudge of bruised lilac in the air, a dissonant cord of shimmering grey that clung to people and places like static.
For the past year, since Leo died, Elara had been quiet quitting life. Her apartment was a testament to a deep and abiding goblin mode: blankets piled into a nest on the sofa, dishes forming a precarious tower in the sink, curtains drawn against the sun’s cheerful audacity. She only left for her job at The Ephemera Exchange, a shop that trafficked in the tangible remnants of intangible things. Old Mr. Abernathy, who had the same sight as she did, had hired her because she could spot a heartbroken locket or a hopeful bus ticket from across the room.
But Mr. Abernathy was gone now, and his son Julian ran the place. Julian, a classic nepo baby, had no sight. He just had a business degree and an obsession with aesthetics. He’d recently created a section he called “Griefcore,” filled with tarnished silver mirrors and single, pressed black roses, which he insisted was a burgeoning market. Elara found it obscene.
“It’s not a trend, Julian,” she’d tried to explain, gesturing to a woman across the street whose lilac aura was so thick it seemed to bend the light around her. “It’s a resonance.”
“It’s a vibe, Elara. And right now, melancholy is the vibe,” he’d replied, his particular beige flag on full display as he meticulously rearranged a shelf of sepia photographs not by date or subject, but by the precise shade of their brownness.
One Tuesday, a new frequency pierced the usual thrum. It wasn’t the dull ache of long-held sorrow or the sharp sting of fresh loss. It was a frantic, serrated shriek of purple-grey, so intense it made Elara’s teeth ache. It followed a young woman who walked into the shop, a human sunbeam in a head-to-toe pink ensemble that screamed Barbiecore. She radiated a determined, almost aggressive cheerfulness, but the violet static clinging to her was a silent scream.
Elara watched her drift through the aisles, her bright pink heels clicking on the floorboards. The frequency spiked when she picked up a small, empty birdcage. Julian, ever the salesman, approached her.
“Looking for something to complete the look?” he asked with a smooth, practiced smile. Elara had to admit, the man had rizz, even if he was utterly clueless.
“Just browsing,” the woman said, her voice a little too bright. “I just… ended a thing. You know. One of those. A situationship, I guess.” She laughed, a sound like tiny glass fragments. “So, main character energy, right? Time for a reinvention.”
Elara felt a wave of nausea. The dissonance between the woman’s words and the violent shriek of her aura was making the air curdle. This wasn’t reinvention. This was a cover-up, a desperate repainting of a house that was rotting from the inside. It reminded Elara of herself in those first few weeks after Leo’s accident, when she’d tried to smile and pretend the world hadn’t ended. It was a delusion she knew well. Thinking you could outrun the frequency. She felt the familiar, delulu whisper in her own mind: *maybe you can fix it*.
Leo had been the one with main character energy. He lived at a higher, brighter frequency than anyone she knew, a golden hum that drew people in. Grief hadn’t just stolen him; it had silenced the most beautiful song she’d ever heard.
The woman in pink was now holding a small, silver music box. As her fingers traced its filigree, the shriek of her aura intensified, focusing on the box until it seemed to vibrate with a visible, violent haze. Julian, oblivious, was already ringing her up.
Elara couldn’t stand it. This wasn’t a vibe to be curated. It was a wound.
Breaking from her self-imposed exile, she walked over. “Don’t buy it,” she said, her voice rough from disuse.
The woman and Julian both stared at her.
“Excuse me?” Julian hissed.
“The frequency is wrong,” Elara said, looking at the woman. “It’s amplifying everything you’re trying to bury. It will just make it louder.”
The woman’s bright smile faltered. A tear escaped, tracing a clean path through her perfect makeup. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Your grief,” Elara said softly. “It has a sound. And right now, it’s screaming.”
She reached out, not to the woman, but to the air around her, her fingers tracing the jagged edges of the lilac distortion. She remembered what old Mr. Abernathy had taught her. You can’t erase the frequency, but you can tune it. You find the fundamental note, the core of the loss, and you harmonize with it. You don’t fight the wave; you learn its rhythm.
Closing her eyes, Elara focused. She let the shriek wash over her, searching for its source. It wasn’t the end of the situationship. It was the hope that had come before it. The foolish, beautiful, fragile hope. That was the note. She hummed it, a low, melancholic tone that matched the color she saw.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, slowly, infinitesimally, the frantic, serrated edges of the woman’s aura began to soften. The violent shriek didn’t vanish, but it lowered in pitch, modulating from a scream to a lament, a deep, sorrowful cello note that was painful, yes, but bearable. Sustainable.
The woman let out a shuddering sob, all the forced brightness extinguishing from her face, leaving behind a raw, quiet sadness. She gently put the music box back on the counter. “Thank you,” she whispered, not looking at Elara, but at the space where the scream had been. She turned and walked out of the shop, her pink outfit now looking less like a costume and more like a fragile defense. Her aura, a deep and mournful mauve, followed her like a quiet shadow.
Julian stared at Elara, his mouth agape. “What… what did you do?”
Elara looked down at her own hands. For the first time in a year, the constant, low-grade hum of her own lilac aura felt different. It was still there, a testament to Leo’s absence. But in tuning another’s grief, she had inadvertently found the rhythm of her own. It wasn’t a frantic cacophony anymore. It was just a note. A single, steady frequency in the vast, silent symphony of what was gone.
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