This time I woke in a library.
A large one — rows of shelves reaching nearly to the ceiling, narrow aisles between them, the lighting overhead a flat, sourceless white that reached every corner without casting shadow. Some people sat at the reading tables with their heads bent, someone nearby was pulling a book from a shelf. The whole space held the particular kind of quiet that is maintained deliberately, everyone in the room contributing to it. I was sitting at a table by the window, an open book in front of me, the chair across from me empty.
I stood in the doorway for a moment without going in. Just looking at the room.
A table. Two chairs. The open book on the table, a cup of something on the side, the chair across positioned as if waiting for me to sit down — as if waiting for me to order something, to pretend that this was an ordinary afternoon, to perform along with whatever this scene was supposed to be.
I walked in and sat down in the chair.
On the table beside the book was a pen. I looked at these things for a long time without doing anything.
I'd lost count of which dream I was in.
Since being taken from the scene with Mum, I couldn't have said how many places I'd been. I'd stopped counting because counting meant reminding myself that the number would only keep going up — never stopping, never returning to zero, never resolving into what I actually needed.
I picked up the pen and set it down on the other side of the book.
The sound was small, but someone at a nearby table looked up briefly. I didn't acknowledge it. I sat there, and in my chest something was gathering — not grief, not anger, something further down than both. The feeling that comes from being trapped in the same thing for too long, from trying everything and arriving back at the same place, from not being able to find any path that didn't loop back. Like pressure building in a sealed space, rising incrementally, until something gives.
And here everyone was maintaining the quiet.
All of them pressing themselves down, pressing their sounds and movements down, sitting in their separate places with their separate silences, performing the collective stillness of this room.
I stood up. My chair scraped back. I walked to the nearest shelf and pulled an entire row of books off it.
They fell one after another, hitting the floor in a sequence of sounds — landing, bouncing, some splaying open, the noise of it spreading through the library in a way nothing in this room was supposed to sound. The carefully maintained quiet broke all at once.
"Miss —"
Someone was coming toward me. I turned to face the room.
"I want to get out."
The words came out at full volume, hitting the walls and coming back. Every head lifted. Everyone still. No one speaking. Just looking.
"I want to get out!" Again — louder, my voice going rough at the edges. "Can you hear me? I want to leave. I don't want to be here. I want to get out!"
My voice began shaking near the end. The last words weren't clear anymore — just sound, just pushing everything that had been compacting inside me outward, pushing it into this room, into these faces that were not real faces, pushing it out because it had to go somewhere and there was nowhere else.
When the voice stopped it was because there was nothing left. Not because I'd chosen to stop. My throat was empty.
My legs went. I sat down on the floor against the shelf, pulled my knees up, buried my face against them, and the crying that came was nothing like what had come before. That kind of crying — the complete kind, where you've stopped deciding anything, where your body just does what it does, your shoulders shaking with it, the floor under you the only fixed thing.
[Severe Anomaly Detected]
[System attempting correction... failed]
[Attempting again... failed]
[Attempting again... failed]
[Attempting again... failed]
Still on the floor. Still crying. I didn't lift my head. I didn't try to stand.
And then the light began to change.
Not a sudden cut — a dimming, one degree at a time, as if someone were lowering a dial very slowly. The library's colours pulled back. The sounds began to recede, distance growing between me and them. The cold of the floor under my hands began to leave, the sensation withdrawing, everything gradually being gathered up and taken away. Slower than it had ever been before. But the same result.
I was still sitting there, still crying, and I was taken.