I glanced over at the digital clock beside me, the beady red of its numbers casting an ethereal glow onto my face as I read it: 12:47 AM. A stark reminder that I need to get my sleep schedule in order before I go back to school in a few short weeks.

My desk light lay perched beside it, casting a soft but warm circle over the open pages in front of me. Everything outside that glow seemed like an afterthought: the empty cans, the old pages of stories I never finished, and the lingering thoughts of dreams I never had the courage to chase. The window was open fully, allowing the stinging summer breeze to whisk through my hair—reminding me that the world kept moving even as I sat still, lost in the stories I write.

I'm supposed to be finishing an assignment—something I couldn't remember the point of and haven’t taken the time to read the syllabus for. Yet here I am, rewriting the same line, trying to make it sound perfect, even though it likely never will. Like most things, I’ll settle for good enough. This time, I write about how I used to drive with no real destination or reason, just letting the wind take me wherever I was meant to be. Much like those drives, I have no idea where this story—or maybe it's a poem—is going.

That's the issue with writing this late.
Everything feels important.
And nothing is.

My soda had long since gone flat, although I didn’t notice when. The soft crackle of its bubbles had vanished, leaving me with just the wind and my thoughts to fill the silence. My fingers wrapped around my pen again, hoping that the act would inspire some flood of creativity—but it didn’t come. I leaned back in my chair, headphone wire pulling taut. I’d forgotten I was wearing them. I was going to listen to music, but I never actually pressed play.

I blinked, sighed, then sat up again. I looked down at the page of half-scribbled cursive, crossed-out lines, and little notes I’d left myself. The words felt like echoes of thoughts I used to understand—of a version of me from minutes or maybe hours ago. I sighed again, took a sip of my soda, then tapped my pen on the page.

The lights flickered—
just briefly.

I paused, staring up at the bulb above me. It stuttered once more. Then again. The flickering became rhythmic. Not random, not failing. Deliberate. Almost like… Morse code? I tilted my head, unsure whether to be amused or unnerved.

Then, everything went dark.

The room vanished, swallowed whole.

No hum of electronics.
No whisper of wind through the open window.
Just silence—thick, pressing, alive.

I sat there, breath held, expecting the power to return, for the cheap bulb to buzz back into amber life and remind me I was still in my room, still at my desk, still just a boy failing to finish an assignment he didn’t care about.

But instead—
a sound.

Not one I heard, but one I felt. A vibration somewhere behind my eyes. Like the creaking of old wood in a dream. Then, colour. Not from the lamp. Not from the streetlights outside. But behind my eyelids. A wash of violet and gold, shapes pulsing like stained glass through water—too soft to define, too insistent to ignore.

I opened my eyes.
Or maybe I never closed them.

The desk was gone.
So was the chair.
So was the window.

In its place—sky. Sky and field and wind that smelled like memory. Like petrichor and pencil shavings and the pages of old notebooks I’d forgotten I’d written in.

I stumbled to my feet—barefoot, somehow—and turned.

A hollowed tree stood at the edge of the hill, branches clawing up toward stars that seemed far too close. Sitting at its roots was a figure. Small. Not quite human. Legs crossed, arms resting in its lap, its head tilted sideways like it had been waiting for me a very, very long time.

“You’re late,” it said, voice ringing like chimes wrapped in fog.

I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. My breath caught in the throat of reality.

It smiled. Or maybe it didn’t. It’s hard to tell when something’s made of light.

“You wanted a destination,” it said, as if continuing a conversation I’d forgotten we started. “But you never needed one.”

It stood, and with a gesture, the world shifted. Colours bloomed across the sky like spilled ink. The field bent and curled into paths that led everywhere and nowhere.

The figure looked back, its eyes—if they were eyes—soft and endless.

“This is where your story begins.”

And just like that, I stepped forward—
into the dream
I didn’t know I’d been writing.