She was wearing a necklace I’ve never seen before, a gold conch shell that glittered against her skin, and her smile made me feel more beautiful. Like I didn’t have to pretend with her, like I could be fully me and it would be okay. I reached out, wanting to make the conch shell glitter even more, make the sparkles light up her eyes, but it grew too big under my touch, the dreamworld screeching against my own head as I tried to control it, the shell starting to weigh us down.

I woke up too soon. Too suddenly. Before I could fix it, there was a click of a door opening and shutting somewhere, like it was inside of me and outside of me and before I could figure out which it really was, my body was twitching, my hands grasping around someone else’s. When I opened my eyes, I saw Emily blearily rubbing her eyes, the ghost of a smile on her face, not as big as the one she had in her dream, but, impossibly, with the same amount of joy lining her face. I blinked and looked around her dorm, reacquainting myself with the waking world and the fact that I was in Emily’s dorm and her roommate, Mary, was walking through the door. She and Emily exchanged some vague words about schedules before Mary had disappeared into the bathroom and Emily turned her soft smile onto me.

“Hey there, sleepyhead.”

“Hey,” I croaked, feeling a heady mix of self-consciousness at falling asleep and self-assured confidence that going back to the dreamland we’d been sharing would be far preferable to being awake.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, and it was so kind, so full of compassion that I wanted to run away as fast as my stubby legs could take me. It had been like this in the past month we’d been dating—I try my best to charm Emily, to be someone she could like and then, inevitably, something gets in the way and she still treats me like a beautiful thing. On our fourth date, a few weeks after I got out of the AM, a few weeks after … everything, we were taking a walk around the Common again, holding hands, more at ease with each other than we’d been the first time we took that walk, but still with the jittery nervousness of people who had only kissed a few times, and I fell asleep. Apparently it was pretty spooky—I started to stumble and thankfully Emily had caught me just in time to sort of … spin me onto a park bench we were walking past. I was only out for a minute or so I guess, because when I woke up, her face was pale and clammy and her phone was clutched in her hand, emergency services up but not yet dialed.