Tabina Tariq
People walk past her. They smile, they speak, they forget. She exists in glimpses. In V. E. Schwab’s novel, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, a young woman makes a deal with the devil to live forever, at the cost of being remembered by no one. The curse is exquisite in its cruelty: Every time she leaves a room, she vanishes from memory. Every introduction is a beginning and an end. It’s a novel about the ache of being unseen, and the strange, stubborn ways humans insist on leaving a mark anyway.
Sometimes that mark is monumental: a book, a painting, a name etched into history. More often, it is microscopic: a shared glance, a passing joke, a half-second of recognition in a stranger’s eyes. Most of our lives are composed of these small exchanges, so brief they barely register as events. And yet, years later, they return without warning, vivid and inexplicable, demanding to be remembered.
When I first read the novel, I thought it was about escaping loneliness—about surviving isolation at any cost. But lately, I’ve begun to think it’s about the opposite: About embracing intimacy, even when it lasts only a moment. Because sometimes, the people we meet once stay with us far longer than those we know for years.
I didn’t understand this. I thought memory belonged to the people who stayed. To friends, lovers, classmates, names saved in contacts. But slowly, quietly, strangers began proving me wrong.
The Silver Fox:
One windy afternoon, I was walking from the chemistry building and, far ahead of me, I noticed a man whose slightly overgrown silver hair kept kissing the wind. His dark clothes hung loosely, but suited him well. He walked briskly, casually eating from a bag of chips. A professor, maybe. Or a journalist. Or hell, maybe even a concerned parent.
From the Glade past the Valley Life Sciences Building and down toward Anchor House, we kept pace. Sometimes side by side and sometimes one behind the other, our paths crisscrossing in silent rhythm. The whole dance felt quietly comedic: he’d turn, and oh! There I was again. I’d turn, and oh! Somehow, I’d end up right behind him. I couldn’t help laughing at the absurdity of it: we were like two private investigators accidentally assigned to follow each other.
There was something strangely comforting about that silent choreography. Two strangers orbiting each other without intention. No introductions. No expectations. Just a coincidence turning into companionship for the length of a sidewalk. In another life, in another story, we might have been important to each other. Here, we were simply passing.
When we reached the crosswalk, the moment felt strangely ceremonial. I angled right, already preparing to turn after the light; he stood in the middle, facing straight ahead. I knew, in that small choreography of bodies and traffic, that our silent orbit was ending. So, in the middle of the street, with cars waiting and students passing, I smiled and said, “I think we were following each other.”
He looked confused for half a second, then laughed softly. “Maybe we were,” he said with a contagious smile. As I turned away, he called out with a wave, “It was nice meeting you.”
And then he was gone. One of those brief encounters that somehow take root in memory. A man whose name I never learned, whose life I’ll never enter again, but who altered the texture of that afternoon. After him, I began noticing how easily strangers could leave impressions without ever intending to. Sometimes I thought I saw him again on campus months later, but I couldn’t be sure. Maybe that uncertainty is the point. Maybe what lingers is not exactly him, but the version of him I carry—the brief, almost-romantic possibility of who he might have been. That possibility lingered long after he disappeared. Unlike Addie’s presence.
Something about that afternoon stayed with me: that even the smallest encounters could echo. Once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop noticing it. The universe gifted me these brief, luminous exchanges everywhere I went.
The Girl with the Camera:
Another time, a close friend and I were walking by Crescent Lawn, on our way to dinner, when the sky erupted into color. Not the kind of sunset you simply notice: the kind that notices you. On the path ahead stood a girl with a camera, crouched in that reverent, concentrated pose only photographers understand.
We stopped to admire her focus, and she smiled. My friend and I are amateur photographers and professional yappers, so we asked about her camera, her club, her work. For a few minutes, the three of us shared the kind of easy, spontaneous conversation that belongs to strangers: no pretense, no history, just presence.
When we finally said goodbye, it hit me that we hadn’t asked for her name. We’d traded ideas, laughter, and compliments, but not identity. It was as if names would have broken the spell: forced this small, perfect encounter into the messy reality of seeing each other again.
Some meetings are meant to dissolve as soon as they happen, leaving behind only a trace of warmth.
Without her name, she became almost mythical in my memory: not a student, not a photographer with deadlines and doubts and unread emails, but a figure suspended in sunset light. A girl kneeling before beauty, trying to trap it before it disappeared. In that moment, she felt less like a person I’d met and more like a reminder of that particular evening: the heat of the pavement, the orange light on her shoulders, the urgency of trying to capture something already disappearing. For a second, I thought of Addie—spending centuries trying to leave some trace of herself behind in a world determined to forget her.
Yeats wrote in his poem, “Ephemera”: “Before us lies eternity; our souls / Are love, and a continual farewell.” There’s something tender about that line—the idea that love, or even recognition, doesn’t have to last to be real. In a way, it answers the loneliness at the heart of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. Some meetings are meant to dissolve as soon as they happen, leaving behind only a trace of warmth. In Yeats’s poem, the lovers stand at a lake knowing their love is ending, yet they remain together in that hour of gentleness. The farewell does not erase what they felt: It dignifies it. That is what the girl bathed in the sunset offered us: not permanence, but presence.
After that evening, I started paying closer attention to the margins of my days. The in-between moments. The people who appeared without warning and disappeared just as quickly.
The Vegan Drug Dealer:
A few weeks later, my friend and I discovered a small outdoor dining nook behind The Butcher’s Son—a vegan restaurant on University Avenue. A man sat alone, devouring a sandwich with something like reverence, so we asked if it was good. He looked up, smiled, and said it was the best vegan food he’s ever had, and that he came to Berkeley just for it.
“Among other things,” he added with a mysterious smile.
The way he said it made us laugh. There was a mischievous undertone, a wink to some secret life we’d never glimpse. We joked later that he was a vegan drug dealer; and that maybe he came here to sell to college students on weekends.
It didn’t matter if the story was true. What mattered was the way a passing stranger became a character: a little myth we could carry with us.
We do this instinctively. We narrativize people the moment they leave us. We turn them into anecdotes, archetypes, inside jokes. It is our way of admitting that they mattered, even briefly. That for a handful of minutes, they occupied space in our imagination. That they were, somehow, worth preserving in memory—even if only as a half-true story we told later.
For a few minutes, his story intersected with ours, and then he was gone. Folded back into the city’s hum of possibilities.
It struck me how easily a person could slip back into anonymity. We forget each other constantly, without magic, without malice. We simply move on.
Fiction, Memory, and the Art of Not Forgetting:
What unites these moments is not who these people were, but the fact that they existed long enough to shift the atmosphere of that day. In The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, forgetting is a curse. In our world, it’s simply how life works. Addie spends centuries carving her initials into walls and slipping her face into paintings, trying to defy erasure. We tell stories about strangers to keep them from disappearing.
In fiction, this act is deliberate; in life, it’s instinctive. We remember the unremembered. We resurrect what should have vanished. Addie cannot scratch her name into paper, wood, or stone; it vanishes the moment she leaves. We can. We carve strangers into memory, and they stay.
The Silver Fox.
The Girl with the Camera.
The Vegan Drug Dealer.
In writing them, I keep them from dissolving completely. And in remembering them, perhaps I keep a version of myself alive too.
And if fiction has taught me anything, it’s that the people who vanish most quickly sometimes linger the longest.
Maybe that’s why storytelling feels like a witness: it’s a form of resistance against forgetting. Not because it asks for miracles, but because it asks us to pay attention. To hold something fragile in our hands and say: This mattered. This will not disappear quietly.
Every story is a small act of refusing to disappear. Not forever, not monumentally, but long enough to matter. When we write, or remember, or retell, we push gently against erasure. We do what Addie cannot: we let someone remain.
When I recall these people, it’s not out of sentimentality. It’s because they remind me how fragile and extraordinary it is to be seen, even for a moment. They are my Addies: people who were not meant to stay, yet who remain because I remember them. Their intensity outlives their duration.
To live, as Addie does, in a world that constantly forgets you, is to discover how memory is a form of love. And to meet someone once and never again is to glimpse how love can exist even in its absence.
We are all, as Yeats wrote, “love, and a continual farewell”—loving as we part, parting even as we love. The strangers who pass through our days—on campus paths, on street corners, in fading light—become part of the story we tell ourselves about being alive.
And if fiction has taught me anything, it’s that the people who vanish most quickly sometimes linger the longest.
They live on in the quiet archive of the heart, where nothing is catalogued properly, but nothing is ever truly lost.
Thinking about these strangers eventually led me inward. If they lived on in me, quietly and invisibly, then where did I live in others?
Sometimes I wonder how many lives I’ve drifted through unnoticed. How many versions of myself exist only in someone else’s memory, half-formed and fading? To someone, somewhere, I am probably “the girl who said something funny once,” or “the stranger who smiled on a rainy day,” or “the person who walked beside me without knowing it.” I will never know.
And yet, the thought feels strangely comforting.
Berkeley Fiction Review 
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