Elisa, eyes narrowed, added, “My grandmother said the rose is a symbol of memory. If you keep it, you keep the pain. If you let it go, you break the cycle.” Together they pieced together the hidden history of Yulibeth R. G. , a name that appeared in old city records as Yuliana “Yuli” Garcés , a poet and activist who vanished during the “Noche de los Lamentos” —a protest against military oppression in 1978. Yuliana had a brother, Rodolfo , who died in a fire that same night. In his dying breath, he whispered “Dejarás de doler” to his sister, promising that the pain of their loss would only persist if they allowed it to.
He blamed it on an old injury from a fall in his teenage years, but the timing was too precise, too ritualistic to be mere coincidence. One evening, while scouting a new wall in Barrio Norte , Santiago stumbled upon an abandoned storefront. In the cracked glass of a dusty mirror propped against a wall, he saw his reflection—hand trembling, eyes hollow. Beneath the mirror, half‑buried in cobblestones, lay a single red rose , its petals wilted but still vibrant in the streetlight.
A collective sigh seemed to echo through the city. The pain that had haunted Mariana, Santiago, and Elisa on that date faded, replaced by a quiet calm. The curse of the broken mirror was broken, not by forgetting, but by remembering and sharing the story. Months later, a small, self‑published booklet appeared on the stalls of San Telmo and in the shelves of the Biblioteca del Sur. It bore the title “Posdata – Dejarás de Doler” and the author’s name Yulibeth R. G. —a pseudonym chosen by the three friends in honor of the poet they had resurrected.
Santiago, still holding his brush, nodded. “The pain… it comes every year. Same day. Same feeling.”
Instinctively, he whispered the words that had echoed through the night on his radio: The ache in his hand faded, replaced by a cold shiver that ran down his spine. He looked at the rose, noticing an inscription etched into its stem: “Yulibeth R. G.”
She attributed it to a family curse, a story passed down from her great‑grandmother: a lover who had died in a fire, swearing to return on the same date, bringing sorrow. The only defense, according to the legend, was to confront the memory, to name it and let it go. That same evening, a young woman entered Elisa’s stall clutching a crumpled envelope. She placed it gently on the counter, eyes wide with desperation. Inside, the same postscript— Posdata – Dejarás de Doler —and the same rose sketch, now clearly labeled Yulibeth R. G. The woman whispered, “I found this at my brother’s apartment. He always said the rose was a sign.”
Inside, a single sheet of paper waited, its edges softened by humidity. Typed in a hurried, almost frantic rhythm, the words began with a simple heading: The rest of the page was a confession, a plea, a promise… a story that would soon ripple through the lives of three strangers, binding them together in ways none of them could have imagined. Chapter 1 – The Archivist 1.1 A Quiet Life in Palermo Mariana “Mari” Fernández had spent the last twelve years cataloguing the city’s forgotten histories. Her office in the historic Biblioteca del Sur was a maze of leather‑bound tomes, yellowed newspapers, and dusty maps of neighborhoods that had long since been bulldozed for modern high‑rises. She loved the silence of the stacks, the smell of paper and ink, the way the world seemed to pause when a leaf turned.
But the night the envelope fell on her desk, something shifted. The name Yulibeth R. G. was unfamiliar, the title Dejarás de Doler —a phrase that seemed both a warning and a promise—stuck in her mind like a broken record. Mariana opened the page. The text was a fragment of a journal, written by a woman named Luna who described a series of “pain points” that appeared in her life every year on the same date: the anniversary of her brother’s death. Each pain point manifested as a physical ache—headaches, broken bones, inexplicable fevers—always resolved when she whispered “dejarás de doler” into a cracked mirror.
Mariana felt a strange pull. She was no detective, but she could not simply file the letter away. The mystery resonated with the stories she had spent her career preserving: forgotten voices, unsolved tragedies, whispered promises. 2.1 Streets of Color Across town, in a cramped loft on Córdoba 220 , lived Santiago “Santi” Ortega , a muralist whose work had become the heartbeat of the city’s underbelly. His massive canvases—brick walls turned into oceans of color—spoke of love, loss, and resilience. Yet behind his vibrant creations, Santiago carried a secret pain: every year on June 12 , his left hand would cramp so severely he could not hold a brush for more than a few minutes.
Elisa brewed a tea from the rose petals, a rare herb known as rosa de la memoria , believed to aid in releasing emotional bindings. She poured the tea over the mirror, letting the steam rise and swirl around the painted shards.
Santiago, guided by his artistic intuition, painted the cracked mirror on the wall, turning it into a massive mural of broken glass, each shard reflecting a fragment of the city’s memory—people holding hands, a rose blooming amidst ruins, a ghostly figure of a woman speaking into a mirror.
The journal ended abruptly, with a postscript:
Author (fictional): Yulibeth R. G. Prologue: The Letter That Never Arrived In the waning light of a rainy Buenos Aires evening, a battered envelope slipped from the pocket of a courier’s coat and landed on a cracked wooden desk in a dimly‑lit office. Its seal—an uneven red wax imprint of a rose with a single thorn—had been broken long ago, the ink on the flap smudged by the tremor of a hurried hand.