A Story called Life Book 2: A collection of short stories and poems from a wandering, free-spirited soul

By Shaheer J. Syed

 A Story Called Life – Book 2 , A collection of short stories and poems from a wandering, free-spirited soul

steps beyond memory and into myth, weaving ten symbolic short stories and their companion poems into a profoundly introspective journey through the inner landscapes of the human soul.

Where Book 1 explored the raw experiences of love, loss, longing, and awakening, Book 2 explores the **archetypes**, **metaphors**, and **inner worlds** that shape those experiences. These are not merely stories to be read — they are stories to be *felt*, like echoes from a deeper place inside you.

Across luminous worlds — cities of silence, bridges that refuse to break, libraries of unwritten destinies, fires that learn to weep, and cosmic looms where human connection is woven — a universal truth unfolds: **Every life contains a hidden mythology waiting to be understood.**

These tales move gracefully through:
• identity and the masks we wear
• courage found at the edge of fear
• grief as a doorway to transformation
• loneliness as a shared human language
• the threads that connect us beyond logic
• destiny, choice, and the stories we carry within

Blending poetic prose with philosophical depth, Book 2 transforms ordinary human emotions into timeless symbolic journeys. Each story ends with a reflective, metaphoric poem that distills its essence — an intimate companion for readers seeking meaning beneath the surface of life.

This is not a sequel. It is an elevation — a journey from the world outside you to the world within you. Tender, wise, and richly imaginative, *A Story Called Life – Book 2* invites you to wander through the invisible terrain of your own becoming.

If Book 1 was a mirror, Book 2 is the key.

Ten stories. Ten inner worlds. Ten mirrors held up to the quiet transformations that shape a human life. *A Story Called Life – Book 2* blends mythic storytelling with poetic reflection, guiding readers through symbolic landscapes of connection, identity, loss, hope, and meaning.

A book for thinkers, seekers, dreamers, and anyone who recognizes that the greatest journeys happen within.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SHAHEER J. SYED
• Release date: Dec 4, 2025
• ISBN: 9798277501641

Book preview

Forward

Have you ever felt it? The ghost of a story living inside your own skin—a flicker of a memory that isn't quite yours, an ache for a place you've never been, a truth you understand in your bones but have never spoken aloud.

We are all libraries of these unwritten tales. Some are catalogued and clear, the stories of our triumphs and our scars, stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the journey.

But others… others are hidden in the dust and shadows, waiting. They are the quiet whispers that only surface years later, when the noise of the world finally stills, and we’ve lived long enough to hear what they were trying to tell us all along.

A Story Called Life: Book 1 was my attempt to light a single lantern in that library. It was an honest confession, a map of my own footsteps, an offering of what I had learned from the falls and the climbs. I held up my experiences and said, with a trembling voice, This is the truth as I have known it. Perhaps you’ve known it, too.

But the quiet that followed taught me a lesson that shattered everything I thought I knew: the soul does not grow only from the soil of what has happened to us. A life lived only in the mirror is a half-life.

We are nourished, haunted, and transformed by the worlds we dare to imagine, by the fleeting expressions on the faces of strangers, by the myths we inherit and the silent truths we discover in the forgotten corners of existence.

This second book, which is a journey of ten years after Book 1; is not just the next chapter—it is also the whole landscape expanding.

This is a conversation held at midnight between what happened and what could have been. Here, the line between memory and myth blurs into a beautiful, heartbreaking fog.

Here, an ordinary moment—the way the afternoon light hits a teacup, the sound of rain on a roof, a door left slightly ajar—cracks open to reveal a universe of meaning. Quiet, unassuming questions are not answered; they become gateways to vast inner worlds you never knew you held within you.

These ten stories are not a balm for your wounds. They are a magnifying glass. They are not a destination. They are an invitation.

An invitation to stop. To hold your breath. To look closer at the beautiful, terrifying, and sacred tapestry of your own life and ask: which threads are truly mine?

If Book 1 was a mirror, designed to show you my reflection in the hope you might see your own, then Book 2 is a key.

A window fogged with rain, through which you can trace the shape of your own longing. And what you see beyond it will be yours and yours alone. For one, it may be a cityscape of forgotten dreams, shimmering under a neon moon.

For another, a quiet forest where forgiveness grows wild and untamed. For someone else, the endless ocean of a great, unanswered question.

The story isn't just on the page anymore. It is out there, waiting for you to see it. Welcome back. Shall we walk further together?

Shaheer J. Syed

Prologue

A Bridge Between Book 1 And Book 2

There is a story written on your skin—in the fine lines around your eyes, in the quiet echoes of heartbreak, in the way you rise each time life asks more of you than you thought possible.

This was the story of Book 1: the raw, personal truth of your lived experience. It was the voice of memory, of moments you survived, of wounds that shaped you, and of joys that taught you who you were becoming.

But beneath those memories, another voice has always been speaking.

You have felt it before—perhaps in the hush after a difficult goodbye, or in the stillness of a night when sleep would not come. A vibration beneath the surface of your life, a sense that your individual story is somehow a fragment of something older, larger, more mysterious. As if your struggles, your hopes, and your moments of clarity were not isolated events, but verses in an ancient, universal song.

That murmuring beneath your lived experience is the second voice. And it is the voice of Book 2.

Where the first book followed the roads you walked, this one explores the forces that shaped those roads. It moves beyond the diary of what happened and into the myth of why it mattered. It speaks in archetypes instead of anecdotes, in symbols instead of chronology. The Wanderer, the Healer, the Shadow, the Light—these figures are not characters in fiction, but patterns within every human life.

You are not simply living through experiences. You are reenacting the ancient rites of growth, loss, courage, and rebirth that have shaped humanity since the dawn of story.

Book 2 is not a continuation—it is an elevation. The moment when scattered memories reveal themselves as a mosaic. The moment you stop asking, What happened to me? and begin asking, What is my life trying to teach me?

Here, we leave the familiar terrain of recollection and step into symbolic worlds—forests of longing, cities of silence, libraries of fate—not to escape reality, but to understand it more deeply.

In these stories, your heartbreak becomes the hero’s descent into the underworld; your courage becomes the flame carried through darkness; your search for meaning becomes part of a lineage older than language.

Book 1 was the story of a life lived. Book 2 is the story of the soul interpreting that life.

If the first book was a mirror, this one is a key. It unlocks the patterns beneath the surface, the myth beneath the memory, the destiny hidden inside the ordinary.

The journey continues— not through the events that shaped you, but through the truths that will define who you are meant to become. The second voice has been calling for a long time. Now the door opens.

Are you ready to step inside?

The Man who followed light

Nick had always imagined that when life changed, it would happen with a thunderclap. Something dramatic. Something unmistakable. But when life truly shifted, it was quiet. Almost embarrassingly quiet. It happened on a Gray morning with nothing remarkable in it — no storm, no revelation, no voice from the clouds. Just an absence. Joe was gone.

It should not have surprised him. Joe never arrived or departed like ordinary people. He was a presence that drifted in and out of life like a wandering breeze — warm, unexpected, temporary. Yet Nick had believed, foolishly, that this time would be different. That Joe would wait for him. That guides do not disappear mid-journey. That angels, or whatever Joe was, do not just… leave.

But he was gone. And the road looked painfully ordinary.

Nick stood at the crossing where he last saw him, the morning cold nibbling at his fingers. The world carried on with its usual indifference — a distant car humming, a cyclist speeding by the soft patter of someone’s dog’s paws against the pavement. Everything normal, everything unchanged. Only him, standing there with a strange ache in his chest, holding onto the fading warmth of yesterday’s wisdom.

Today is all you have, Joe had said. It echoed now, oddly louder in Joe’s absence.

Nick breathed in slowly. He did not know where to go but standing still felt like refusing the invitation life was sending him. So, he walked. He was not following a plan. He was not following a map. He was not even following hope. He was following the faint feeling that somewhere ahead, Joe had left something for him — a trail, a sign, a whisper.

He walked until the city began to thin. The noise scattered. The sky opened a little. A quiet neighbourhood unfolded around him, where houses stood like half-forgotten memories behind their hedges. He turned corners without intention, as though guided by something soft and wordless.

Then he saw it. A small light, no bigger than the flame of a match, hovered near the curb. It was not a reflection. It was not sunlight. It was simply there — a tiny bead of pale gold, floating an inch above the ground as if undecided whether to rise or vanish.

Nick blinked hard. The light remained. No explanation made sense, so his mind offered none. Instead, something deeper — something older — stirred inside him. A recognition without logic.

When he stepped toward it, the light moved. Not away. Forward. As if leading. His breath caught. Joe? he whispered.

The light did not respond, but it drifted ahead slowly, almost politely, pausing whenever Nick hesitated. It stayed close enough to follow, far enough to remain unreachable. Nick felt a strange mixture of fear and familiarity. He followed it through narrow residential lanes, past old fences and rusting bicycles leaning against walls. The air carried the faint scent of morning dew and distant fireplaces.

Eventually, the houses gave way to a small abandoned playground. The swings creaked with the push of the breeze. A seesaw leaned unbalanced as if waiting for a ghost to return. The light floated across the playground and settled beside the bench where once — years ago — Nick had come to escape the noise of life. He stopped breathing. That bench.

He knew it well — the place where he sat at twenty-two, heartbroken and confused, when everything felt shattered. The place where he had cried quietly because grown men are not supposed to cry loudly. The place where a stranger had once sat beside him and asked, without introduction, Hard day?

That stranger had stayed for five minutes, said nothing other than a handful of simple truths, and left before Nick even learned his name. The same rhythm Joe carried years later. The light hovered over the old wooden bench like a memory reawakened.

Nick approached slowly. When he sat down, the light dimmed until it was barely visible, then tucked itself beneath the bench as though hiding. He did not understand it, but he felt its meaning. This was not a sign pointing outward. It was pointing inward — toward the parts of him he had left behind.

He looked at the rusting chains of the swings. He looked at the carvings on the bench — initials from forgotten lovers, declarations from teenage rebels, small promises etched into cheap wood with keys or pocketknives. The world seemed quieter here, like a cathedral built of childhood echoes.

Nick leaned back and let the silence settle. Who had he been then? Who was he now? And why did it feel like life was pulling him back through doors he thought he had closed long ago?

The wind brushed past. A leaf landed on his shoe. A distant dog barked, then fell silent again.

He closed his eyes. In the darkness behind his eyelids, he saw moments bleeding into each other — his younger self staring at the sky, his older self-staring at the ground, the years between them filled with stumbling attempts at living.

He remembered the night he told someone he loved them and meant it with all the sincerity of a trembling heart. He remembered the day that love slipped away like water through hands. He remembered dreams too big for the life he was living, and fears too loud for the dreams he had left.

It was not sadness or regret that filled him now. It was something heavier — the realization that he had walked through life half awake. Awake, Joe often said, is not the opposite of asleep. It is the opposite of unaware.

Nick opened his eyes. The light rose from beneath the bench. This time, it hovered directly in front of him — close enough to illuminate his face lightly, like a quiet touch. Then it drifted toward the edge of the playground, pausing to make sure he followed. He stood.

The light led him to a narrow alley beside an old bookshop. The shop looked ancient — its sign peeling, its windows covered in dust. Books were stacked haphazardly inside, visible through the glass like fossils. A dim bulb flickered behind the counter, but no one was there.

The light paused at the entrance. Nick reached for the door. It gave way with a soft groan.

As he stepped inside, the air shifted. It smelled like old paper, ink, and the subtle loneliness that collects in places where stories sleep. The shop was small, cramped with shelves leaning at tired angles. He felt as though he had entered the inside of a forgotten mind. The light drifted toward a far shelf labelled UNFINISHED.

There were dozens of notebooks, each blank on the cover except for a small handwritten tag: *Someone’s Beginning. *

He picked one up. It was simple — brown cover, rough pages, no lines. When he opened it, the first sentence stopped his heartbeat. It was his own handwriting.

*I do not know where I am going, but I hope it is somewhere better than where I have been. *

He had written this sentence years ago — in a journal he had lost during a move. A single page, a single line. He remembered the night. He remembered the feeling. He remembered how badly he wanted life to change. Tears pricked the back of his eyes, not from pain but from recognition — as if the sentence had been waiting patiently for him to return.

He flipped the pages. Empty. The story was unfinished. The light hovered above the notebook, brightening just slightly, as if urging him to understand. Nick closed the cover gently and pressed it against his chest.

The message was simple, and it landed with the weight of quiet truth:

**You cannot follow the light without first following your unfinished self. **

He breathed slowly, deeply. The shop felt warmer — or maybe his chest did.

A soft chime sounded behind him. He turned.

A woman stood at the counter — hair in a loose bun, glasses perched on her nose, hands folded quietly. She looked at him as though she had been expecting him all morning. You found your book, she said.

Nick swallowed. What is this place?

A library of moments, she replied. Everyone leaves chapters behind. We keep them safe.

Why bring me here? You were not brought, she said gently. You followed.

Nick looked down at the notebook. What am I supposed to do with it?

Finish it, she said. Not on paper. In life. The light floated toward the exit.

The woman smiled — a soft, knowing smile that made him think of someone who had seen thousands of souls wander through the same door.

Don’t lose it again, she whispered. Nick stepped outside. The moment he crossed the threshold, the shop behind him vanished — replaced by a narrow wall with old posters peeling at the edges. The alley was empty.

He did not feel fear. He felt something else — a small, solid certainty that the world had always held such hidden doors; he had simply never been open enough to see them. The light drifted ahead once more. Nick followed. His journey had only begun.

Nick walked without knowing the time. The city had its own quiet rhythm, a pulse that seemed to slow whenever the light drifted lower, near ground level, and quicken when it rose, like a thought lifting toward clarity. He began to sense a pattern. The light was not simply leading him somewhere. It was teaching him how to move, when to pause, when to pay attention.

They crossed a busier road now. Cars rolled past in waves. The light waited at each crossing, never rushing ahead, always remaining just within reach. Once, when Nick hesitated too long on the edge of the sidewalk, lost in thought, the light dimmed slightly, as if reminding him: movement, not paralysis. The step matters, not the certainty.

On the other side, a cluster of older apartment blocks rose up, their facades lined with balconies stacked like pages of an old diary. Some had laundry hanging; others were empty, bare, closed. The light floated toward one particular building, stopped in front of a doorway marked by a peeling number and a broken intercom.

It hovered, then drifted up, tracing the outline of the stairwell. Nick pushed to open the door. This one did not complain or groan. It yielded easily, and he stepped into the stairwell, where the air smelled faintly of dust and boiled vegetables.

Up? he murmured. The light moved upward along the stair rail, spiralling with patient grace.

On the third floor, it stopped in front of a door left slightly ajar. A sliver of interior light spilled into the hallway. He could hear a sound from inside, something between a hum and a sigh. He hesitated, unsure if he had any right to be there.

Then a voice from inside called out, If You are here, you might as well come in. This door has not stayed closed properly in years.

Nick froze. I…I am sorry. I did not mean to intrude.

Well, you’ve already begun, the voice replied, more amused than annoyed. Come in. Shoes off, if you can. The floor remembers everything, and I prefer it to remember kindly.

He slipped his shoes off and stepped into a modest living room. An old woman sat by the window in a worn armchair, her hair tied back loosely, her skin wrinkled in the way that speaks more of weather than of age. Thin but steady hands rested on her lap. Behind her, the window opened onto the Gray day, light dripping in gently.

The small orb slipped past him and settled above a wooden side table, illuminating a framed photograph. In it, a younger version of the woman stood beside a man with laughing eyes, both of them squinting at the sun as though life were too bright to look at directly.

She followed Nick’s gaze. He’s been gone for fourteen years, she said softly. The frame does not know it yet. It keeps telling me he just stepped out for bread.

Nick did not know what to say. I am… sorry.

Everyone is, she replied, not unkindly. But sorry is for accidents. This was just life. Sit down, boy. You look like someone walking inside his own head. Nick sat on the edge of a low stool near the window. The light stayed near the photograph, pooling warmth around it.

I did not mean to disturb, he began, then stopped. What was he doing here? Because of a floating