A faded photograph hung above the window sill. At a glance, the picture seemed to have captured a lost memory from some distant age — from a time that has long since passed. A young woman in a black dress holding a parasol was standing in a tall field of grass, further back in the image was a sea of green hills and a leafless tree that seemed distant only because time has declared it to be so.

I always thought it was the picture of someone that had come before me — rushing the same blood that flowed within me, reflecting the same light that my eyes always reflect. However, the girl’s eyes reflected something else; her eyes were unlike mine, nor did the blood that coursed through her veins. In her eyes was a spark — a macabre spark of flame — just what was it that the lady had seen? That the world seemed to have stopped just for the light in her eyes to be captured.

If you’re so curious, why don’t you come here and see what I saw? I once heard the young woman ask that of me.

No, I told her, I couldn’t have possibly come to you.

With a small sigh she stared into my eyes and then said, with that searing spark in her eyes, That’s not a problem for me.

The next day I saw that the photograph was lost, or so it seemed from a glance. What was depicted did not change, could never change: a tall field of grass, the sea of green hills with the leafless tree, and the parasol — the parasol that was left in the ground.

The young woman was gone.

The spark in her eyes has been extinguished at last.

And that’s what I thought.

But just beyond the window, a black silhouette was standing on a tall field of grass, blown by the breeze her black dress fluttered in the wind.

As her gaze locked with mine, I could hear her say, “I had been waiting for you.”

And for the first time ever — through the reflected light from her eyes, I could finally see what she had seen all along, that spark in her eyes that had been extinguished from the picture.

Ah, it was me.

She had finally come to me after all this time.

In response to a writing prompt from a discord server.