"—Haah... —hah"
That dream again.
How many more times am I going to see this dream? Whenever I close my eyes and try to sleep, it always comes back.
I've lost count of how many times I've seen it.
At some point, it stops feeling like I am having a dream, and starts feeling like the dream is my reality. People say dreams are just random fragments of the day, stitched together by the brain.
But that's not entirely right. If that's true, then what does it mean when the same scene returns, again and again, unchanged?
A mistake that keeps repeating isn't a mistake anymore. It's a pattern—and pattern is a message. But the problem is, I don't know if this is a warning, a punishment, or a memory. All I know is the moment darkness closes in, it appears.
That corridor never ends, or perhaps it's just me walking in circles. That door never opens. And that voice that almost says my name, and then falls back into silence. If something repeats this much, does it stay a "dream"? Or does it become another kind of reality, one that only opens when I close my eyes?
Perhaps neither. Or perhaps both.
What part of me keeps insisting on this one? What wound is replaying itself behind my eyelids, night after night?
I don't wake up surprised anymore. I wake up as if I've just finished my second life and come back to the first one. The same ceiling, the same bed and the same old room. They all feel like the afterimage, not the original.
For a while, I lie there, staring up. Sometimes, waking up feels staged. Like someone set up the room. Measured the silence, placed the pillow and everything else. Everything feels a little too arranged, someone decided this was the version of morning I should have today.
I hate that.
These pauses aren't mine, are they? These breaths don't feel like I'm truly alive. When I speak, is it really me?
Don't put words in my mouth.
I can speak for myself...
... can't I?
...
The silence answers me, not with words but the stillness that waits for the next line. I sit up because that's what I'm "supposed" to do here. My feet touch the floor. Cold—too cold.
I hate that too.
Sometimes I wonder if the world stops when I stop looking.
Maybe that's why it's always so quiet here. When I blink, the room feels slightly rearranged. The same furniture and the same wall. Like the memory of a place instead of the place itself.
Maybe that's what living is. A long series of rehearsed awakenings. You wake, you breathe, you speak, and every gesture follows the script. You forget who wrote it, so you call it routine. I've read that people find comfort in repetition. Pattern means order, and order means peace. But I don't think peace is supposed to feel this heavy.
When people mean waking up, they make it sound simple.
But I think there are different kinds of waking.
The body wakes up first, then the eyes and then the voice. I'm not sure which part of me is awake right now. I wonder how many times I've already stood here.
I used to believe I was alive because I could choose. Well, that belief aged like everything else.
Once you start to notice the repetition, you realize how little of you is you.
The way I breathe. The way I hesitate before moving. Even the words I choose, they all feel rehearsed.
Like I've said them before, in another morning, under another sky that looked exactly like this one.
The floor creaks softly under my weight. It's strange how something as small as a sound can convince me I'm here. Perhaps that's what reality is: a collection of noises, when they start to agreeing, you start to fade.
I wonder how much of me exists when I'm not looking. If I close my eyes now, does the room wait patiently in the dark, or does it dissolve the moment I stop believing it exists? Perhaps things only exists because we keep pretending they do like a silent agreement between the observer and the observed.
But then, who observes me?
The question lingers in my head. If I'm aware of being watched, it means I've already accepted that my life isn't fully mine. It's like standing on a stage without knowing when the play began and when will it end. You keep moving because you're afraid to hear the audience breathing.
Maybe that's what God really is. Or maybe something worse, someone who isn't divine and just curious. Someone who wanted to see what I'd do if they gave me a voice and then forgot to take it back.
I'd probably hate that too.