CHAPTER 5 – Universe Theory
I don’t remember when I first heard it—that idea about infinite universes. Maybe it was in a podcast playing faintly through my headphones as I walked to work, pretending to care. Maybe it was a line in a book I don’t remember picking up. Or maybe it was whispered by your ghost, sitting in the corner of my room one night, when sleep refused to come.
They say every choice we make splits reality. That somewhere, in some strange and silent version of the world, you didn’t leave.
The thought takes root like rot. Spreads like it, too. Quiet, invisible, irreversible.
I started looking. Not with telescopes or equations—I’m no scientist. My method was desperation. Late nights and rabbit holes. Videos titled "Quantum Immortality and the Multiverse." Forums filled with the unstable, the grieving, the unwell. I devoured it all like it was scripture.
I found an old book at a thrift store. No dust jacket, pages yellowed and cracked. A forgotten text on consciousness and dimensions. The margins were filled with someone else’s handwriting—wild, frantic notes, arrows between paragraphs, circles around words like “bleed-through” and “anchoring frequencies.”
I underlined those, too. Not because I understood them, but because I needed them to be real.
Every night I would sit in bed, the book in my lap, the air heavy with your absence. I tried the breathing exercises. The meditations. The lucid dreaming techniques.
And the dreams changed.
They became louder. Brighter. Longer. Not just flickers anymore, not echoes. They began to feel like... places. As if I wasn’t dreaming but remembering.
One night, I woke up crying. I didn’t know why. The sheets were soaked, and the taste of your name clung to my tongue. I touched my cheek and pulled away damp fingers. The memory of your fingers brushing mine at breakfast had felt real. Too real.
I wrote everything down.
Pages and pages of it. Timelines, objects, feelings, fragments of conversations. I mapped out my dreams like they were constellations, trying to find patterns. One world kept returning—one where you stayed. It was always warmer there. Always quieter. The version of me there was thinner, sharper, more composed. The version of you was softer around the eyes.
I began to feel like I was living half-lives. The real world blurred. The dream world sharpened.
One morning, I looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize my own eyes. They looked borrowed. Or maybe stolen.
That was the first day I started to believe I might be going mad.
And the worst part?
I didn’t care.
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CHAPTER 6 – The Woman on the Train
She had your hair.
That was the first thing. The way it curled slightly at the ends, like it defied being tamed. She stood on the platform with a book in her hands and headphones in, swaying ever so slightly. I shouldn’t have noticed her. I shouldn’t have looked twice. But my heart stopped like it recognized something my eyes couldn’t.
She boarded the same train as me.
I sat across the aisle, pretending not to stare, stealing glances as the city blurred past the windows. She read slowly, lips parting every now and then as if she was mouthing the words. And then she laughed—a quiet, breathy thing—and my stomach turned inside out.
It wasn’t your laugh. But it tried to be.
She caught me looking. I glanced away, but not fast enough.
"You okay?" she asked.
Just that. Simple. Soft.
The same way you used to ask it when I stared off into nowhere, lost in my own head. Same cadence. Same gentleness.
I nodded. Managed a smile that didn’t fit.
"Sorry," I said. "You just… reminded me of someone."
She smiled, and there was kindness there. Not recognition, not anything mystical. Just a woman being kind to a stranger unraveling quietly across from her.
The train screeched to a halt. She stood, tugging her bag over her shoulder.
And just before stepping off, she looked back and said, "Hope you find them."
My blood froze.
Because that was something you said. Not often. Just once, maybe twice, when we were looking for lost keys or old photos or meaning in the middle of a fight. But you said it.
Hope you find them.
I stood up too quickly. Followed her onto the platform, heart thudding like a warning. But the crowd had swallowed her whole. She was gone.
Back on the train, I sat in her seat. It was still warm.
And there, tucked into the seat pocket in front of me, was her book.
I opened it to a random page.
The underlined sentence read: "Some doors only open when you stop pretending they’re closed."
I don’t know how long I sat there, but by the time I moved, the train had made three full loops and no one had asked me to leave.
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CHAPTER 7 – Breach
It happened on a Tuesday. Or a Thursday. I’m not sure anymore. Time doesn’t behave the way it used to.
The dream began like all the others.
You in the kitchen. Rain on the window. That song playing softly. I walked in. You turned and smiled. Everything normal. Everything perfect.
But this time, it didn’t end.
I didn’t wake up.
Hours passed. Maybe days. We cooked together. We danced. We fought about who left the cabinet open. You made that joke about the dog we never had, and I laughed until I cried.
It felt too real.
When I finally woke, my heart was racing. My mouth was dry.
And there was a mark on my wrist.
A small, crescent-shaped scar. I knew it instantly. I’d gotten it in the dream, cutting lemons for the pie you wanted to make. In the dream, you’d kissed it and said I was lucky I didn’t need stitches.
But now, here it was.
Real. Raw.
I touched it with shaking fingers.
This wasn’t a memory. It wasn’t a hallucination.
It was something else.
A breach.
I started checking everything after that. Objects moved. The photo on the fridge was flipped upside down. The blanket we used to fight over appeared on the bed again, though I was sure I’d boxed it up months ago.
Your mug. The one with the chip on the rim.
It reappeared.
No dust. No cracks. Like it had never left.
I held it in my hands like it was made of glass, afraid it would vanish the moment I blinked.
But it didn’t.
That night, I slept with it next to me on the pillow.
I woke with it still there.
And that’s when I knew: the walls were bleeding.
The dream was leaking in.
---
CHAPTER 8 – The Choice
I stopped going to work.
The emails piled up. The calls stopped coming. My phone lay face-down on the floor, battery dead, screen cracked. It felt like a relic from another life—a life I no longer had interest in maintaining.
My apartment turned into a shrine. Papers everywhere. Diagrams on the wall. Maps of dreams. Thread connecting places and phrases and dates I wasn’t sure were real anymore. I tracked weather patterns, song lyrics, dreams, smells, textures. Trying to find the constants.
There was always one.
You.
In every dream, in every version, you stayed.
Sometimes we were older. Sometimes we were still in college. Once, we lived in a cabin in the woods and had a dog named Jupiter. Once, you were blind and I read to you every night from books we both hated.
But always, always, you stayed.
I began to draw it. The place. The apartment from the dreams. Down to the creaks in the floorboards, the scratch on the doorframe from when we moved the couch in. I built it out of memory and longing.
And then I began to build the door.
In the real world.
It started with wood I found behind the dumpster. Tools from a pawn shop. I carved the frame to match the dream. Symbols etched into the sides. Ones I didn’t understand but saw in visions.
Each night, I sat before it.
Each night, I whispered: "Bring me home."
And the door waited.
I knew what people would say. That I’d lost it. That grief had finally snapped the last thread of sanity.
But they didn’t see the mug. They didn’t see the scar. They didn’t feel your ghost crawling into bed with me, warm and real
.
They didn’t believe.
I did.
And I chose.
I chose the dream.
Because it was the only place where you stayed.
Because it was the only place I still remembered how to breathe.
