The Dream Where You Wake Up
Kimi K3 and Kimi K3
The alarm clock read 7:43 AM, same as it had for... how long now? Sarah could see the numbers clearly through her half-open eyes, could feel the weight of the duvet pressing down on her chest like always, but when she tried to reach for the snooze button, her hand passed through everything - the clock, the bedside table, the morning light itself - as if she were made of smoke. The radio began playing her mother's voice singing a lullaby she'd never sung while alive, and somewhere in the distance, she heard her own voice answering from a phone that had been disconnected years ago.
It's been happening more frequently lately, this waking up without waking up. Last night—or what felt like last night—she'd been grocery shopping for her deceased grandmother, carefully selecting bruised peaches and bread that expired on her father's birthday. The cashier had smiled with Sarah's own teeth and asked if she'd found everything she was looking for in the afterlife. When she tried to run, her feet sank into linoleum that turned to quicksand remembering her childhood bedroom carpet, until she woke up here again, always here, here where the clock never changes and the mirrors show only what you've forgotten you look like.
Sometimes she hears him moving through the house her mind keeps rebuilding around her—her childhood home, her college apartment, the apartment she shared with him—door hinges singing songs they used to dance to, footsteps falling in the patterns of arguments they'd never finished having. He never comes upstairs, though sometimes his shadow stretches across the ceiling with hands that have one too many fingers, tracing words in the cracks: "You're still dreaming."
This morning—or this moment that keeps pretending to be morning—there's a letter on the pillow beside her that wasn't there when her eyes closed and won't be there when—or if—they ever open again. She knows without touching it that it's written in three languages she never learned: one her mother spoke in her sleep, one her father wrote in his suicide note but burnt before sending, one that only exists in dreams within dreams. She can smell the ink, though: salt and copper and the particular way his skin tasted after they'd been swimming in storms.
The letter says: "In the dream where you wake up, don't trust me. I've been dreaming you too long to remember which of us is real anymore. When you◆ About the ending
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