Waking up was a strange experience.
Not because Claire was missing from the bed - she was right there, well within my arms, silently breathing in and out in her peaceful, well-deserved slumber.
It wasn't because there was something wrong with the way I slept either, not when I woke up perfectly well-rested. I had such a good night of sleep, in fact, I could feel all of the exhaustion from the past few days vanishing into thin air, by now a mere unpleasant memory of how I was rather than something I still had to seriously cope with.
No, it was something else entirely.
It was the feeling of a long, extremely detailed, and somewhat emotionally important dream fading into the obscurity of the short-term memory getting reset.
