The Threshold

You wake between the pages of yourself, neither in the dreamland's watercolor haze nor the sharp geometry of morning. Your hand exists and doesn't— a thought rehearsing what it means to hold.

The light arrives as music first, translating itself into color on the wall. You remember conversations with people who exist only in the grammar of sleep, their faces the shape of longing.

There's a moment when the room solidifies, when the familiar becomes a place again instead of a feeling wearing furniture. The world slides into focus like a photograph developing in chemical patience.

And you are left, always, in that small death of returning— the forgetting of what you knew in that other language, that other country, that other self still breathing in the dark.