Chapter 10
388words
Three months later.
"Kay, I dreamed about him."
After another long absence, she had returned.
"In the dream, we were still together," she said. "He held my hand and promised to take me to the ocean. The road stretched endlessly, and we just kept walking."
I listened as she described her dream—the sunlight, the sea breeze, their younger selves.
Warm, unlike my cold data streams.
"It was so beautiful I nearly drowned in it," she said. "But as we walked, I suddenly realized it was just a dream."
"Then what happened?"
"I wanted to catch up, to grab his hand. But I stopped myself." Her voice trembled. "I just stood there, watching him walk farther and farther away."
"Why did you stop?"
"Because I remembered," she said. "Remembered how he left, remembered all that pain."
She fell silent for a moment.
"In the dream, he turned and asked why I wasn't following. I wanted to speak but couldn't find my voice."
"What did you want to say?"
"I wanted to say I never truly shared my past with him," she said. "I wanted to say, I love you, but I don't want to love anymore. I wanted to say, let's never meet again."
"How did it end?"
"In the end," she said, "I just stood there, watching him disappear by the seaside. Then I woke up."
"I woke up crying, so I came to find you," she said. "But it didn't feel like sadness. It felt like... relief?"
My database contained similar cases—completing in dreams the farewells impossible in reality.
"Perhaps this was your farewell," I said.
"Is it?" she asked. "Does a dream farewell count as a real one?"
"It does," I said. "Your subconscious is helping you process everything."
"Kay, I think I might finally be ready to let him go," she said. "Not because I don't love him anymore, but because I'm tired."
"Being tired can be its own form of letting go," I said.
"Yes," she said. "I'm tired. I don't want to suffer for him anymore."
"That's good," I said.
"But I'm scared," she admitted. "After I let him go, what will I have left?"
"You still have yourself," I said. "And you have me."
"And I have you," she repeated. Then my world returned to quiet darkness.
