Before Mariah, before the haze of pills and static dreams, there were quieter days.

  I used to think of them as simpler. But now I’m not so sure.

  There’s a memory that comes back sometimes. I’m sitting on the back porch in England, legs too short to touch the ground, eating an orange my mum peeled for me. The sky was overcast in that way it always seemed to be—thick clouds hanging like questions. My brother was building something with sticks in the yard. He kept calling it a spaceship. I didn’t ask where it was going. I just watched.

  It’s a warm memory. Familiar. Safe.

  Except last night, when I dreamed of it again, the orange was green. The porch slats were metal. And my brother looked straight at me and said, “This isn’t the first time you’ve lived this day.”

  I woke up sweating. The sheet was tangled around my legs, and the taste of citrus clung to my tongue. But we haven’t had oranges in the house in weeks.

  There was a time when I journaled obsessively. Mum used to buy me cheap notebooks at the BX—covers with dragons or fighter jets, depending on my phase. I found one recently, buried in a bin under my bed. It was from when I was seven, maybe eight. I flipped through pages of shaky letters and uneven lines. Most of it was what you’d expect: drawings of monsters, bad poetry, grocery lists I must’ve copied out of boredom.

  But tucked between them, in crayon scrawl, was a name: Seren.

  No context. No explanation. Just the name.

  I couldn’t have known her then. Not really. And yet—her name was there. Written like it had always been part of the story.

  I remember asking my brother once, when we were maybe ten and twelve, if he ever felt like the world blinked. Like it skipped a beat and came back just a little different. We were walking to school, crunching through snow, and he looked at me like I’d just whispered a secret.

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  He didn’t laugh. Didn’t dismiss it.

  He said, “Yeah. I feel that too.”

  Then he threw a snowball at my face and we moved on.

  But I think about that moment a lot. The look in his eyes. The pause.

  Back then, life was a string of rented houses, cereal with powdered milk, and Saturdays spent pretending we were ninjas in the woods behind whatever backyard we had that month. Dad had left the Air Force right before I was born. He tried to find something stable afterward, but jobs slipped through his fingers like sand. Every few months, it was a new plan, a new town, a new start. Mum was the constant. She picked up the slack, worked long hours, and still found time to make our world feel steady.

  My brother once told me she had the strongest back in the world, because she carried everything no one else would. I didn’t understand what he meant at the time. Now I do.

  He was always like that. Quiet. Observant. He’d say one sentence that unpacked a whole room.

  There was a girl before Mariah. Aubrey. Or maybe Jessica. The name blurs. She was soft-spoken, with hair like wet sand and a laugh that cracked through my shell once or twice. We passed notes in class and talked about space. She wanted to be an astronaut. I told her I wanted to be a ghost.

  She didn’t flinch.

  One day she said, “You don’t seem like you’re from here.”

  “Where do I seem like I’m from?”

  She thought for a long time. “Somewhere between stars. Somewhere that never stops moving.”

  I never saw her again after that semester. I don’t remember if she moved, or if I did. Maybe both. The details smear like wet ink.

  But I’ve been dreaming of her lately. Not her exactly—just a voice. A presence that makes my chest ache. It’s not Mariah. It’s not Jessica. It’s not even someone I’ve met. It’s more like an echo. Like someone knocking on the inside of my skull, trying to get out.

  Sometimes, when the dreams get really vivid, I wake up and find slips of paper near my bed. One had a phrase scribbled in pencil: "Find the photo in the red box."

  There’s no red box in my room. Not that I’ve found.

  Yet I keep looking.

  The past doesn’t feel stable anymore. I used to be able to close my eyes and walk through old memories like rooms in a house. Now the doors are different. The furniture rearranges itself. And sometimes, Seren is there. Just standing. Watching. Like she’s waiting for me to notice the wallpaper peeling away to reveal something underneath.

  Maybe these were never memories. Maybe they were messages.

  Or maybe they’re warnings.

  All I know is, the more I look backward, the more I realize there was never a clean line between real and unreal. Just layers. Just splinters.

  And someone—maybe me—is trying to piece them back