Entry I
Today marks my first assignment here at the Atmospheric Records Bureau, an assessment coded Mission B-27: Debunking the Elemental Myth of Rain and Drought. According to the file, this “myth” is about two elemental souls, Rain and Drought, who reincarnate across time. When they come together, it is brief, but their meeting alters weather systems: blossoms break from deserts, rivers run dry overnight, storms rise from nothing but grief. Our task is to prove it false, or that’s what I was told.

It sounds almost poetic. But beneath the beauty lies a question: is this myth a forgotten truth of the planet’s design, or just another tale humans spun to comfort themselves in the face of calamity?

He was already working at his desk.

I was told his name is Shael, but he never introduced himself. He never even turned to look at me. He sat sunk in the chair with his shoulder blades arched back, like a hawk over an ancient weather chart, one they probably used before anyone thought to digitise them. He wore brown. Every day. Well-pressed, appropriate.

His desk was an altar to neatness. Within two hours of getting it, mine was a disaster; plus Post-it notes out of control on my side of the wall, open notebooks, half-empty mugs of tea.

He didn’t speak. Not to me. Maybe not to anyone.
I, however, had no problem speaking for both of us.

Entry IV
There is a rhythm to silence. I have begun to listen to his.

When he is in full thought, he presses his right thumb against the pad of his index finger. When he disagrees with a theory, he makes frantic little loops with his pen in the margins of reports.

I want to think he’s started to listen to me as well. Sometimes, briefly, when I mutter a joke under my breath, a glimmer of a smile almost breaks his face.

Today I told him that rain wasn’t from evaporation or condensation. I said clouds cried because they missed water so much.

He looked at me, “I don’t believe in longing,” he said flatly. “It weakens the mind.”

I smiled. “I think it expands it.”

He didn’t reply. But the pen stopped moving.

Entry IX
We searched the records together. Floor 3B, shelf 27. Weather data from the 1800s. There is a myth, a documented anomaly: a monsoon in December, in a desert. Meanwhile, a rainforest city went dry. The locals called it a “love wound in the sky.”

The myth recurs. Across cultures, across years.

Shael calls it coincidence. Mission B-27 would have us label it “Coincidental Atmospheric Aberration – Category B.” But the label felt hollow, like pressing a seal onto smoke.

Shael believes love is hormonal distortion, that memory only corrupts clarity. I think he is frightened of love, the flooding, tender kind.

Entry XI
I discovered a photograph in one of the files. A boy and girl on a boat. The folder was marked Experiment 52-A, with no other information.

When I showed it to Shael, his face shifted. Then he looked away and muttered something about “mis-filed data”.

I stayed late that evening and stared at the photo until the automatic lights blinked out. The girl smiled like I do. She had dimples, just like mine.

Entry XV
I gifted him a plant today. A jade, small enough to sit on his desk. I called it Eden. I thought he might appreciate its steadiness, the way it stores water patiently in its leaves, asking for almost nothing in return. A plant designed to survive neglect.

And yet, he never even looked at it. By the next day, the soil was already dry, the pot gathering dust in the corner as if it had always been there. He didn’t ask why I brought it, didn’t ask its name. He only returned to his research.

I said nothing. The irony was sharp. Maybe once he could tend to such things, but grief had stripped the language of nurture from his hands. His eyes look too old to be so young.

Entry XIX
I was right. He once tended a garden.

I found the records in the abandoned greenhouses – rows of cracked clay pots, soil long turned to dust. He had planted seeds during the famine years, watering them with whatever little he could spare. There was a notebook too, each page carefully dated: Day 12 – still nothing. Day 23 – still waiting.

But the rains never came, and nothing grew. In the end, he stopped writing.

Of course he doesn’t believe in longing. To him, waiting means watching hope wither.

Entry XXV
Something has changed. He hovers now, as though the hours stretch differently around us.

When I leave my reports half-finished, he completes them – his handwriting threaded into mine, seamless. Once, I found a mug of tea waiting on my desk – sweetened with exactly two spoons of sugar. I never saw him place it there, but the steam felt like his breath.

This afternoon, he noticed the size of my hands and laughed – softly, almost shy. We compared palms. His skin was rough, calloused with a history I will never fully know. As our fingers aligned, I felt the sudden dampness of his sweat. His eyes sharpened – fear, almost-just as I realised the air between us had tilted.

He pulled away his hand as though it burned.

That night, unseasonal rain fell in the Taklamakan desert. Mission B-27 would have me file it as an Outlier. But I said nothing, though I could feel the storm pooling in my chest.

Entry XXIX
What if we are them? Or their remnants?

It rained in the Sahara today and snowed in Chennai. The Board is panicking. Our investigation has been ordered to stop.

But Shael and I don’t speak of it. We keep working quietly, our hands brushing across old records.

Today, I caught him looking at me too long, his jaw tight as though holding back words. Before he could turn, I reached for his scarred knuckle – the one he hides beneath his sleeve. His hand trembled under mine, heat rising between our palms.

For a heartbeat, he let me hold it there, eyes unguarded, almost pleading. Then the moment closed. But the air stayed thick with everything we didn’t say.

Entry XXX
I came in early but he’s no longer here.

This morning, his desk was bare. No files. No resignation in the system. Only a signature: Memory Redaction Protocol.

He wiped it. Everything. Every moment.

Entry XXXI
I sat in the rain for four hours.

There’s no heartbreak quite like speaking to someone every single day, only to turn around and realise the language you built together has been erased.

There’s no devastation like a love that lives only in one memory.

Entry XXXII
A new researcher arrived.

It was him. Shorter hair, same brown sweater.

“Shael,” he said, extending his hand.

This time he looked me in the eyes. No recognition.

I laughed nervously. He smiled, soft, puzzled.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why, but I feel like I’ve disappointed you.”

His hand was warm, hesitant. His thumb pressed against his finger – the same gesture I know by heart.

I shook my head. “No. Never.”

But the clouds cried again.

Entry XL
The air inside the Archive feels heavier, though I can’t tell if it’s the walls or myself carrying centuries this time.

I don’t know how many times it has happened. Maybe we are reincarnations. Maybe we are the echoes. Maybe we are the myth itself.

Mission B-27 still sits open in my queue, flagged red. They say Rain and Drought were cursed never to meet at the same time. That when one remembered, the other forgot. Maybe it isn’t a curse, but balance. Perhaps he was never mine to hold – only mine to find, again and again.

And yet, every rediscovery feels like the first wound reopening.

Last Entry (Unsent)
The Board has offered me the Redaction Protocol. A mercy, they called it. Clean, efficient. To forget is to keep serving without ache.

I told myself I don’t believe in myths anymore. I believe in cycles. I believe in weather that repeats itself, in storms folding into drought, in grief folded into joy.

But tonight, I signed the form. Tomorrow, I will sit beneath the machine and let them take him away from me. Possibly then, for a while, the sky will clear.

If he passes me in the Archive again, I hope I will still smile, even without knowing why. For if memory fails me, let my eyes remember what my mind has lost.

[End of Mission B-27]

Image credit: Generated by Taarina Therese Chandiramani using Freepik AI.