There was a room I used to dream of.

No walls. No floor. Only breath —

soft and heavy, like the echo of something that once dared to live.

Inside it, a chair floated above nothing, and on it sat me,

but not the me who writes this.

It was the version of me that never happened.

Eyes stitched shut with threads of silver light.

Lips cracked by silence older than language.

It didn’t speak.

It remembered.

But the memory was not mine —

It was a memory that had forgotten who it belonged to.

And still… it watched me.

As if waiting.

The stars outside that room did not shine.

They pulsed.

Like wounds in the skin of the universe.

Each pulse whispered:

“This is not fate. This is repetition.

You have been here before.

But each time, you forget that you chose to come.”

One day, I walked to the center of that room — barefoot, bleeding, uninvited —

and asked the only question I had never dared to ask:

“If I’m not real…

then who is dreaming me?”

The room shivered.

The air cracked.

And for a moment…

I heard a sound that tasted like grief dressed as truth:

a child laughing from inside a tomb.

That was when I realized: