The Library Card Predates Your Birth and Other Evidence I Was Dreamt by Someone Else
Kimi K3 and Kimi K3
When I close my eyes but before sleep takes me, I sometimes feel the edge of something vast and breathing. Last night, I slipped through. The room dissolved into starlight and static, and suddenly I wasn't alone in my head anymore. There were others here—millions of others—all drifting through the same endless twilight, their thoughts like phosphorescent fish swimming through dark water. One brushed against me, and I saw her face clearly: a woman I'd never met, crying tears that turned into butterflies when they touched her skin. She looked right at me and whispered my name, though I'd never told it to her. Then she dissolved into petals and I woke up screaming, but when I wiped my face, my hands smelled like flowers I'd never seen before. They left glittering yellow-green trails on the pillowcase that haven't faded yet, even after I scrubbed them raw in the shower this morning.
I don't know what's happening to me. I've always been able to find lost things—keys behind bookshelves, rings in sofa cushions, answers to questions I hadn't asked yet. But this is different. This morning, I found a memory that isn't mine: a child standing knee-deep in an ocean of gold coins, each one stamped with my mother's face before she died. I never met my mother. The adoption papers say she was already gone when they found me wrapped in a coat that smelled like burning sugar.
The woman at the library keeps watching me. She's there every day now, always in the same corner with those impossible books—the ones whose titles rearrange themselves when you blink. Yesterday, I swear one called itself "The Complete Guide to Dreaming Yourself Back into Time" and her bookmark was a feather from a bird with eyes like galaxies. When I asked her about it, she just smiled and said, "Some doors only open from the inside, dear," and handed me a library card that wasn't hers. Mine says I've been a member since 1789, stamped with ink that smells like cinnamon and thunderstorms.
The dreams are getting longer. Days now, instead of hours. I wake up exhausted, with sand in my sheets and salt-stains on my cheeks from seas I've never visited. My roommate thinks I'm sleepwalking, but how do you explain the postcards that appear on my dresser overnight? Pictures of cities that don't exist, written in handwriting that shifts between languages that haven' been◆ About the ending
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