Sasha was awake again.
She had lost track of how many nights she'd spent like this—staring out the window, waiting for an answer that never came. The stars shone with their usual indifference, but to her, they felt like distant warnings. It wasn't the night's silence that kept her awake—it was something deeper, pulsing in her chest with every heartbeat. A hunger. An emptiness that gnawed from within.
She rose from bed and walked barefoot to the window, the cold floor biting at her soles. The clock read 2:37 a.m. Her hands trembled as she leaned against the frame. City lights blinked in the distance, but her mind couldn't focus on them.
Instead, it always drifted back to the dreams.The nightmares.
At first, she hadn't thought much of them.
People with sunlit skin and light eyes. Men in white robes. Women holding children. Elders resting on steps. A vibrant plaza frozen in time.
Then, the sound.
One explosion. Sharp. Brutal.
The air became fire. Walls collapsed. Everything fell apart. And Sasha felt it. The heat. The roar. The suffocating pressure.It wasn't a dream. It was something else.
The ones who caused it weren't among the dead. They were above, watching.
Then came the second blast.And the third.
Chaos. Screams. Blood. Smoke.She couldn't wake up.
It wasn't a dream.It was a warning.
She jolted awake, drenched in sweat. Her room was a cruel contrast to the inferno she had just lived through. She didn't sleep that night. Or the next.
On the second night, the dream returned—sharper, more vivid.
She approached her mother. She told her everything: the faces, the heat, the language she didn't understand, the smoke.
Her mother smiled gently, dismissively.
"It was just a nightmare, Sasha."
But Sasha searched.
India? Afghanistan? Somewhere in the Middle East?
And then she found it.Lebanon. Beirut.
Her chest tightened. She had seen it.
"It's real. The place from my dream—it's real."
Before her mother could answer, her younger brother came into the room.
"Sasha, open Facebook. I sent you something."
She turned on her laptop. It loaded slowly. A live video popped up.
And then—
The plaza.The people.The roar.The explosion.
Exactly the same.Flames consumed the streets.Bodies lay motionless.Buildings obliterated.People suffocated, cried out, died.
Just as she had seen. Just as she had dreamed.
Her heart dropped. A cold sweat climbed her spine as her mother hugged her tightly. Tears fell without strength. She couldn't look away.
"This is exactly how I saw it... They're all dead," Sasha whispered.
Her mother turned slowly toward the screen. Her face twisted in fear. She opened her mouth—but no words came.
At that moment, her brother rushed upstairs, alarmed.
"What's going on?"
Before he could process anything, their mother slammed the laptop shut. Her movements were firm, but her shaking hands gave her away.
"Don't speak of this again," she murmured, staring at the closed computer like it could trap reality inside.
Sasha couldn't stop trembling. She understood what this meant.
She saw it.She didn't imagine.She didn't invent it.She lived it.
And in the back of her mind, a voice—soft, unfamiliar—whispered:
"It wasn't a dream.It was a memory before time."