After that...
I don’t remember falling asleep, and that’s the part that keeps scratching at me the most. There was no slow drift, no soft surrender into dreams, no moment where the world dimmed and gave me permission to leave it. One second I existed somewhere real—my room, I think, something familiar, something that should have grounded me—and the next I was standing on a sidewalk that stretched too far in both directions, like it had forgotten how to end. The sky above me was a pale, exhausted gray, not…