This time, coming back was different.
Not the sudden kind of shift — not arriving all at once. More like rising from very deep water, moving toward light one increment at a time, taking a long time to cover the distance, until finally breaking the surface.
I didn't open my eyes immediately.
What I felt first was weight. Not lightness — actual weight. The weight of my back against something solid, the surface's specific shape and texture pressing into me clearly. The weight of my arms. My legs. The rise and fall of my chest with every breath. Everything present and specific in a way that felt slightly strange.
Then smell. Clean, with a faint trace of something metallic, and something else — harder to name, the kind of smell left by a machine that's been running for a long time. Not strong, but constant and close.
Then quiet. Not the cultivated kind. The real kind — the quiet of a closed space with nothing extra in it, only my own breathing, clear and distinct.
I opened my eyes slowly.
White ceiling. A light inset into it, brightness even and flat, pressing out all shadow from the space below. I held my gaze there for a moment, letting my vision focus, letting my mind catch up.
Then I looked to one side.
The machine was beneath me. I was lying on it — the thin soft material against my back, familiar. The contact I'd felt before, the first time. White walls. White floor. The control panel. The cables, thin and ordered. The room exactly as it had been the first time I'd come here.
Noah was not here.
Only me.
I lay without moving and looked at the space for a long time.
This is the dream giving me something new to hope for.
That thought was not new. It had come every time — every hospital room, every classroom, every space that had initially seemed like the return to reality. It had come so many times that it had worn into something like reflex: wake up, and the thought is already there, already waiting, already wearing its familiar shape.
I let it sit. Didn't try to verify it. Didn't dismiss it either.
My throat was dry in the way it gets after crying, a roughness when I swallowed. I looked at my hand — on the knuckles, a faint redness from where I'd caught something when I was clearing the shelf. Still there. An injury from inside the dream, and it had followed me here. I held my gaze on it for a while. I didn't know what it meant. I didn't have the energy to decide.
I sat up slowly, my back leaving the machine. A dull ache along my spine from the angle. I sat with my feet hanging in the air, not touching the floor, and looked at the white wall ahead.
I didn't know if this was real. I didn't know if I'd actually come out.
If not — if this was another one — then what was next. How many more shifts, how many more places to wake up in, how many more times to find some reserve of something and tell myself that maybe this time is real, only to discover it wasn't. If the day came when that reserve was gone —
The heat started behind my eyes.
I didn't stop it. I sat there and let it build, let it tip over, a tear falling to the back of my hand, warm. I watched where it landed, watched it slowly absorb into the skin and disappear.
Is this all there is.
Is this the shape of it now — one dream after another, no end, no exit, no one knowing where I am, no way back, just this, indefinitely, until one day I can't remember my own name, can't hold the outside in my mind anymore.
Another tear.
Where is Dad right now.
The thought arrived and something seized in my chest. What is he doing now. Does he know I'm here. Is he looking. I held the image that came: him alone in the living room, the television on at its usual volume, his phone screen lighting up, him checking it — not my name, putting it down again, looking back at the screen without really watching it. He wouldn't say anything. He never said things like that. He would only wait — for me to come back, for the door to open again, for confirmation that I was still somewhere to be confirmed.
I didn't know how long he'd been waiting.
I lowered my head into my palms.
I didn't let myself think further than that.
Then, at that moment, sound from outside the door.
Busy and dense — many people moving at once, many voices in the same space, footsteps overlapping, and underneath them the sound of something contacting walls or floor, sharp and purposeful. Not random passing. Directed toward something. It came through the gap at the door's edge and filled the quiet of this room all at once, and I pulled my head up.
I looked at the door, and my heartbeat quickened.
I had no idea who was out there, no idea what they were there for, no idea whether any of this was real or only the next version of hope the dream was offering me. But the sound was getting closer, getting clearer, and there were voices in it that I couldn't make out the words of, but the direction was right. Coming here.
Then the door came open.