The Store That Sells "Meaning"

There is a store that wasn't there yesterday.

A store that sells something no one can see, no one can hold-something that doesn't sit on any shelf.

It sells meaning.

And Rebecca needs it more than anyone.

She doesn't know why she walked through that door. Why the man behind the counter handed her a broken pocket watch. Why the weight of it feels wrong, like it's taking something from her.

She only knows what he told her.

Three days.

Three days to figure out why time is running out. Three days before something erases.

Before she loses herself completely.

But Rebecca isn't the only one being rewritten.

The reader is, too.

Look around. Is anything... different?

--

Rebecca wakes up feeling like she lost something.

She always does.

It's not grief. Not heartbreak. Just absence.

Like the memory of a dream she can't quite catch.

Most days, she moves through life like a sleepwalker. She works. She eats. She scrolls through strangers' lives online.

And still-

Something is missing.

But she doesn't know what.

She doesn't know if she ever even had it.

She is stuck.

She feels it deep in her bones. Like she's paused, hovering between one life and the next, waiting for something to shake her awake.

People tell her this is just how life is.

You wake up. You go to work. You keep going, even when it feels like you're not going anywhere at all.

She tries to believe them.

But at night, staring at the ceiling, she feels it again-

That quiet, aching hollowness.

The voice whispering:

This isn't real.

You were meant for something else.

But what?

She doesn't know.

Maybe she is just another person who will live and die without ever knowing what it was all for.

But then-

One night, in a rain-soaked alleyway, she finds a door that wasn't there before.

A store she has never seen.

A sign that feels familiar, even though she has never read it.

And for the first time, she feels something other than empty.

She steps inside.

And her story begins.