Night had no sound, only the dim hum of a city that refused to sleep. I found myself standing between two roads, the air thick with waiting. The divider beneath my feet felt like a line between worlds — one road murmured of what I had lived, the other glowed faintly with what I had not yet dared to become.
From the right side came a sudden flare of light — a bus, enormous and faceless, its headlights slicing through the mist like a question I couldn’t answer. The beam caught my eyes, white and relentless, the way reality sometimes does when it insists on being seen.
I turned, and from my left, a weight slipped from my hands — a bag, half-open, and within it my laptop, the keeper of words, the quiet bridge between me and the world I could never touch. I tried to reach for it, but time broke its rhythm. The bag fell, spun once, and burst open on the asphalt.
Cars didn’t stop. Wheels rushed past in blurs of red and silver. A crack, a crunch — a sound too final. My world of letters shattered under them.
I felt the grief before I felt my knees on the ground. “It’s broken,” I whispered — maybe to the wind, maybe to no one. “My laptop is broken.” The words trembled like a confession.
And yet, through my tears, I saw something strange. The screen, half-buried in dust, still flickered once — just a line of light, thin as a pulse. Then it faded, but the glow didn’t die; it moved instead — from the crushed glass into the air around me, and then quietly into my chest.
Somewhere deep inside, I understood. The road was still waiting. The bus lights were still ahead. And though I had lost the thing that once carried my words, the words themselves had not died. They had only changed their home.
So I stood up, wiped my face, and stepped to the right — into the light that had been calling all along. Behind me, the sound of engines faded into something almost like silence, almost like peace.
And that’s where the dream ended — on the edge of two worlds, with loss behind me and something unnamed, but luminous, waiting ahead.
