I don’t know where things with Emily are going to be when I go back tomorrow. I don’t know where things with my family are going to be. Where things with myself are going to be. I don’t know what I want. I want to feel the kind of love that Owen felt for Dr. Bright in his dream, I want to find the mysterious dreamer who has been grabbing hold of my brain every night for the past week, I want to go back to work and have Chef see that I have a good palate and excellent knife skills, I want to talk to Aaron about what it’s like to be inside other people’s heads, I want to ask my mom if she forgives me, if she still loves me, I want to quit literally everything else—Emily, my job, my life—and spend the next ten years sitting next to my dad at a baseball game or hearing him talk about the terrible pulp novel he’s reading.

I want to sleep. I want to dive. Maybe not as much as before—I forgot the way that real fresh air tastes—but knowing that I could have all those things I want, and more, in that dreamworld makes it a lot harder to stay away. Does it matter if it’s not real?

JANUARY 13TH, 2017

The last thing I expected to do when leaving the AM was make a friend.

No, wait, correction: the last thing I expected to do when leaving the AM was run into someone from inside the dreamworld.

It went like this.

Most of the day was pretty much the same as last time—final checkups, far more paperwork than makes sense for a two-week program, and a final therapy session. I’m happy to say that Dr. Loving was pretty pleased with my progress. I’ve started to … I think “open up” is the official term.

I still haven’t talked about my dad though. I know she knows. But I just … I wouldn’t know where to even begin. Dr. Loving wants me to continue with Dr. Bright, which I’m game for (especially since I’m weirdly invested in finding out what happened between Dr. Bright and Owen) so I guess maybe I could continue on the track of actually being honest about my feelings, except I’d have to explain everything to Dr. Bright. But where do I begin that conversation?

And maybe I don’t need to talk about that stuff! Maybe I’m processing it just fine! Dr. Loving didn’t seem to think I needed more work.

“But don’t be afraid to come back here if things get hard again,” she continued. “This is an ongoing process. As you explore your ability more, learn to live with it in a healthy way, your relationship to it will change, and that relationship will need constant tending.”