The next morning, a fragile light seeped through Nathaniel's blinds, casting a gray hue over his apartment. His head pounded, remnants of last night's marathon writing session fogging his thoughts. On his desk, the pages he'd written lay scattered, each paragraph a fragment of himself, a piece of his pain he'd managed to capture in words.
His eyes fell on a line he'd written, one that sent a chill through him now. The boy wandered through shadows, searching for faces he thought he'd known but now couldn't recognize. In the story, the boy had lost his way in a dark forest, surrounded by echoes of a home he couldn't remember. It was a twisted mirror of Nathaniel's life—familiar faces, familiar places, all blurred, all unreachable.
Nathaniel's fingers brushed over the words, and he could feel memories clawing their way up from the depths, memories he had fought for years to keep buried.
The accident. His brother's voice, shouting through the darkness, panic and pain laced in every word. A screech of tires, a flash of light, then nothing but silence and cold, endless darkness. Nathaniel had woken up alone in a hospital room, the sterile white walls pressing down on him, suffocating. And after that, life had become a series of empty rooms and empty days, a blur of therapists and friends who tried to reach him, but could never quite understand.
He shook his head, forcing the memories back into their box, but the ache remained, lingering just beneath the surface. He thought about stopping, about putting the story aside, but he knew it wouldn't help. He was in too deep now. He had to keep going, had to keep pulling the memories out, piece by piece.
That night, he returned to the boy's story. The boy had fallen asleep under the shadow of an ancient tree, seeking shelter from a storm. But in his dreams, the shadows crept closer, whispering his name, taunting him with visions of the home he'd lost. Nathaniel wrote until his hand cramped, pouring his sorrow and anger and loss into each line, transforming his memories into something both familiar and foreign.
As he wrote, he began to see a glimmer of something he hadn't felt in years—purpose. In telling the boy's story, he was finally telling his own, finally facing the pain he'd run from for so long.
At dawn, he fell asleep at his desk, the pages spread around him like a shield, a fragile barrier against the ghosts of his past. And for the first time in years, he slept without dreams