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…and then my heart almost stopped.
The woman in the photograph was me.
She didn’t look like me.
She was me.
The same eyes. The same small mole near my upper lip. The same smile I saw every morning in the mirror.
Trembling, I stepped closer and read the name carved into the stone.
Marija Popović.
The same as mine.
My legs gave out, and I sat down on the cold bench beside the grave. The air felt heavy, and the cemetery on the edge of the city—surrounded by old pine trees—suddenly turned into a nightmare.
At first, I thought it had to be a sick joke. Or a horrifying coincidence.
But the dates engraved on the stone were real. The date of death was five years before I met my husband, Andrija.
My whole body started to shake.
I pulled out my phone and frantically scrolled through old photos of myself, taken long before him. The same face. The same person. There was no doubt.
That was the moment I finally understood what I had been pushing away for years:
Andrija didn’t choose me for who I am – he chose me for who I looked like.
All the strange little things I had once ignored came rushing back.
His insistence that I wear my hair a certain way.
His irritation when I bought clothes that didn’t fit the “style that suits me best.”
The sentences spoken in that quiet, unsettling tone:
“That looks best on you… just like that.”
Just like her.
I stood up suddenly and almost ran away, tears streaming down my face. I didn’t go home. I sat down in a small café nearby and ordered tea, though I never touched it.
An hour later, Andrija called.
“Where are you?” he asked calmly. Too calmly.
“At the cemetery,” I said shortly.
There was a long silence.
“You were there…” he whispered.
“Why is my photograph on her grave, Andrija?”
His breathing changed. There was nowhere left for him to hide.
When he arrived, he looked broken. He sat across from me and, for the first time, couldn’t look me in the eyes.
He told me the truth.
His first wife really had died. After that, he obsessively searched for her in every woman he met. He began to believe that if he found someone identical to her, he could somehow fix the past. When he first saw me on a crowded bus, he said the world started spinning.
“You were her, Marija… only alive,” he said in a broken voice.
He had placed the photograph on the grave recently. He replaced the old one because he could no longer look at the past. He wanted to believe I was a continuation.
I paid for the tea and stood up.
“I am not anyone’s replacement,” I said calmly. “And I have nothing to apologize for to a dead woman because of the lies you built.”
That evening, I packed my things. I didn’t take anything expensive.
Only my clothes—and my dignity.
Months have passed.
Today, I live in a small apartment that I pay for with my own work, with a sense of peace I never had before. I look at myself in the mirror and, for the first time, I see only me.
And I know one thing for sure:
love should never hurt, and it should never turn you into a shadow on a photograph carved into a gravestone.
