The Threshold

The dream dissolves like sugar on the tongue, its sweetness turning to salt, to nothing. Your eyes still closed, but the world reassembles—the hum of traffic, a bird's sharp interrogation.

You float in the narrow room between, where logic hasn't reclaimed the keys, where a hand on your shoulder could be your own hand, or the hand of someone gone, or just the weight of the blanket shifting.

The light behind your eyelids fires differently now. Colors that have no names, that collapse the moment you look for them. A geometry of breath and stillness. The body remembers it is a body; the mind resists.

This moment costs nothing and everything. It will not come again. It comes again exactly as it did yesterday, tomorrow, though you will never quite reach it twice the same way.