The Girl Behind My Eyelids
Cast: Euijoo x Y/N
Genre: Angst, Psychological, Tragedy
WC: 5,285
TW‼️: Mental health issue. Schizophrenia mentioned.
Mental health takes everything from you, until it takes your life.
Chapter I: Shelves and Silence
The poetry section was the quietest place in the library.
Tucked between a dusty card catalog and a long-forgotten emergency exit, it sat in shadow, rarely disturbed. No children wandered here. No students tapped on laptops. Only the silence, heavy and still, lived here. And Euijoo liked it that way.
Every morning at 9 AM sharp, he arrived at the library. By 9:04, he was arranging the returns. By 9:17, he was reshelving poetry. He didn’t speak much. He didn’t mind the solitude. The books spoke in ways people couldn’t. Their words didn’t judge. They simply existed, like him.
Until the day she arrived.
He noticed her humming before he saw her—a soft tune, familiar, like a childhood song half-remembered. She sat cross-legged between the Neruda and Rumi shelves, a thick poetry book in her lap, her finger tracing each word slowly.
She looked like she belonged there. Like the shelves had grown around her.
She didn’t notice him at first. And Euijoo, startled, didn’t speak.
But she came back the next day. And the day after that.
She always sat in the same spot. She always hummed. Sometimes, she read aloud, barely a whisper. Her voice melted into the walls like warm honey.
One afternoon, she looked up and caught him watching.
“You always reshelve the thick books first,” she said.
“They fall easier if I don’t,” he replied, startled by his own voice.
She smiled and went back to reading. Nothing more. But something changed.
She became a routine.
They didn’t exchange names. They didn’t need to. She began leaving notes in the margins of the books. Just small things:
“This line felt like being held.”
“I wonder if Neruda ever wanted to disappear.”
Euijoo started replying. Carefully. Pencil only.
“He did. But he loved too loudly to vanish.”
Then she started bringing tea. Black, no sugar. The same way he drank it.
“I never told you that,” he said once.
“You didn’t have to,” she answered.
She helped him shelve books now. Walked home with him on cloudy afternoons. Came to his apartment, barefoot, placing sunflowers in chipped jars and humming as she swept the floor.
“This place needs light,” she said.
He never asked how she knew where he lived. She was just there—like the words in his favorite poems. Sudden. Familiar. Inevitable.
On rainy days, they danced in the kitchen. On quiet nights, she’d sit cross-legged on his couch, sketchbook open, scribbling thoughts she never read aloud.
Sometimes he’d wake from a dream to find her watching him, face soft in the dim light.
“You were crying,” she’d whisper. “But it’s okay. I’m here.”
And when the static returned—when his thoughts cracked like glass and the walls felt too loud—she would press his hands in hers and whisper, “Stay with me.”
He always did.
But small things started slipping.
The barista looked confused when Euijoo ordered two teas.
"You mean just for you?" she asked.
“No, one for—” He turned, but the girl beside him was gone.
He blinked. Maybe she’d gone to the restroom. Maybe—
He shook it off.
Another time, his coworker frowned. “Why do you keep talking to yourself in the poetry section?”
“I wasn’t. I was with—”
But the name never came.
He tried to sketch her one evening. Her face was clear in his mind—daisy-colored eyes, the curve of her smile—but when he looked down at the page, it was blank.
Still, he drew her again the next night.
And the next.
Each sketch more fragile. Her hands faded. Her eyes blurred. Like she was disappearing.
He left the final drawing unsigned, but wrote at the bottom:
“I finally know what home looks like.”
Chapter II: The Unwritten Margins
She didn’t come back.
Euijoo waited. Every day. 3 PM. Poetry section. A daisy on the floor. Her favorite book open.
The silence returned. But it wasn’t kind anymore. It pressed against his lungs.
He asked the staff. The regulars. Desperately.
“Do you remember her?”
Confused glances. Concerned frowns.
“You’re always alone, Euijoo,” someone said.
He stumbled home.
No shoes by the door. No toothbrush beside his. No cup with flowers. No sketches on the fridge.
He opened his journal. Her notes—gone.
All the handwriting was his.
All of it.
The world tilted. The silence swallowed him whole.
He stopped going to the library.
Didn’t eat. Didn’t sleep. Just drew.
Dozens of sketches. Her eyes. Her hands. Her smile. Her shadow.
He flipped through the sketchbook one night and whispered, “Did I invent you?”
The room didn’t answer.
He wrote his final journal entry the morning he died:
“If she was only in my mind, why did she make everything feel more real than this?”
“I can’t live in a world where I’m the only one who remembers her.”
“This grief isn’t imaginary. But maybe I am.”
He made tea—for two.
Left one untouched.
Then, on a fresh page, he drew her one last time.
No smile this time. Just her eyes, looking back at him.
He taped the drawing to the wall.
And then, in silence, Euijoo took his life.
They found him three days later.
Slumped beside his desk. Sketchbook open. A daisy beside him.
On the wall, the final drawing of her.
Beneath it: a sticky note.
If you see her— Tell her I waited.
—
Weeks later, a new librarian shelving old books found a journal behind the Rumi shelf.
Inside were hundreds of sketches.
And one final message:
She never existed. But she was still the love of my life.
END.