Where I Don't Exist

You are going to read this as a story.

A man loses someone. He stops sleeping. A woman made of light shows him a hundred worlds where she's still alive, still laughing, still breathing - and in every one of them, he's the one who's missing.

You'll tell yourself it's just fiction. A metaphor. A clever structural trick about grief.

But somewhere around the part where he asks "have I told you I didn't wake up?" - stop, and ask yourself when the last time was that someone checked on you. Really checked. Not the polite kind of checking.

Because some stories are told by people no longer here to correct you if you get the ending wrong.

This might be one of them. You won't know until you finish it.

And by then, it might already be too late to ask.