Morning had already started without him.
Light sat in the room like something that had been waiting. Not bright, not urgent, just present. The desk was unchanged. The screen still dark. A glass of water half-finished from the night before. He stood there longer than necessary, letting his body synchronize with the day, letting awareness arrive in stages instead of all at once.
Work returned before intention did.
Messages stacked quietly. Notes half remembered. Diagrams that had followed him into sleep and returned intact, stubborn, unchanged by rest. He sat down and continued, almost automatically. Thinking while working. Working while thinking. The two had stopped being separate weeks ago.
What looked simple from the outside refused to stay simple.
A system. An integration. An inspection pipeline that had to speak to another system that barely existed yet. Fiber optics. Images. Assumptions dressed up as decisions. Every time someone said “it’s straightforward”, the design split again, branching into edge cases no one wanted to own.
The noise started early.
Thoughts overlapped. Reactions arrived before questions finished forming. Some felt like his. Others arrived already shaped, already arguing. He couldn’t tell which were which anymore. He stopped trying. Instead, he watched the movement itself, the way you watch traffic without counting cars.
Outside, the world was already racing.
Meetings booked weeks ahead. People speaking in conclusions. Acting as if tomorrow were confirmed, as if uncertainty were a delay instead of a condition. Today felt narrow, compressed between explanations no one had asked for and outcomes no one fully understood.
Someone said it would be easy.
It wasn’t.
Days bled into nights. Nights folded into mornings. Sleep became optional. Conversations repeated themselves with new words. He debated. Explained. Re-explained. Thirty decisions hiding inside one diagram. And every day someone else glanced at it and said, “So… this is simple, right?”
Someone died during those weeks.
The work didn’t stop. No pause. No silence. Just another message added to the queue.
By early afternoon, the designs reached a stopping point. Not finished, just submitted. Sent forward into hands that would decide later, hands that had barely noticed the work until it arrived complete.
His body noticed first.
The pressure that had been holding everything together loosened all at once. Exhaustion arrived heavy and undeniable. He lay down without ceremony.
Sleep took him quickly, but not gently.
He woke up crying.
Not suddenly. Gradually. Awareness returned in layers. First the weight in his chest. Then the sound of his breathing. Then the room again, reshaped by afternoon light. He didn’t move. He let it pass through him without asking for meaning.
When it thinned, something else remained.
Anger.
Dense. Controlled. Anger at the timing. At the way his body waited until the work was done to open. As if vulnerability needed clearance before entering the airspace.
The dream lingered, refusing to dissolve.
She had been there.
Not as memory, as presence. Alive in the way dreams insist on. An old house. A search for her photograph. People who were supposed to be family but felt subtly wrong. Only a grandmother’s face carried something close to familiarity, and even that shifted when he looked too long.
He waited on a balcony.
Watched the street.
Expected her.
She never came.
Time inside the dream didn’t move forward, it folded. It felt like he had jumped far ahead without permission, stranded in a future that no longer recognized him. He noticed himself acting sad, wanting attention, and the awareness unsettled him. He didn’t want their attention.
He wanted hers.
The scene broke apart. Children laughing. Mockery. Someone calling him crazy. A bucket of paint thrown from nowhere.
He surfaced fully.
Tears still there. Real. He reached for his phone. Missed calls. Friends checking in. He called back. Their voices were steady, anchored in now. They told him to come out. To sit together. The timing felt exact.
He stood. Keys. Wallet. Phone.
The door closed behind him with a sound that echoed longer than it should have.
Movement helped.
The road opened ahead of him, familiar enough not to demand focus, present enough to anchor him. He had always liked driving. It gave his thoughts something steady to move against.
As the city slid past, the image clarified.
An airplane.
Not imagined, recognized.
The car held its lane. The cockpit stayed quiet. Behind him, the cabin was full. Passengers talking, arguing, reacting. He couldn’t tell which voices were his thoughts and which were not. They blended together, interrupted one another, competed for attention.
And still, he was responsible for the flight.
Some passengers demanded service immediately. They were used to being first. He attended to them because the system required it, because order depended on sequence. Further back, a little girl waited.
She had been waiting since boarding.
She wanted the biscuit. She had been watching the aisle. She shifted in her seat, hopeful, restless. She laughed, then cried, then asked for her mother. No one noticed. A tablet glowed in her hands, pulling her somewhere else while the present slipped past.
He saw her.
He wanted to stop. To turn around. To give her the biscuit first, just once. But the aisle was blocked. Procedures existed. Expectations too. He moved forward instead, telling himself he’d come back.
The cabin grew louder.
Sometimes he flew manually. Sometimes he relied on autopilot. Autopilot helped, until it didn’t. Until the drift became noticeable. Not dangerous. Just enough to require correction.
The weather wasn’t his.
Storms appeared without warning. Airspace closed. Routes changed. Somewhere far away, people in control towers made decisions he had to obey. Old systems. Incomplete instructions. Delays that rippled forward without explanation. He adjusted anyway, compensating constantly, rewriting the route mid-flight while the passengers complained about turbulence.
He checked the cockpit often.
Lights blinked. Gauges shifted. Red. Then orange. Then green again. Some warnings resolved on their own. Others waited, demanding attention later. The cabin behind him lived its life, impatient, loud, unaware of how much effort steady flight required.
At some point, he lost sight of the little girl in the movement.
The thought stayed with him longer than it should have.
Traffic slowed. Then moved again.
He didn’t rush the landing.
For now, it was enough to stay present. To keep the plane steady while the world accelerated toward tomorrow.
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