I was wearing something I wouldn't normally wear—a cropped top and a long skirt, flowing and unfamiliar, like I had been dressed by a version of myself that only exists in parallel timelines. Maybe I was trying on someone else's code.

I think, in this version of the world, Lu and I stayed friends. Maybe that's why I initiated self-sabotage protocol—redirected my obsession toward the boy I used to like back in elementary school, though I could barely reconstruct his face but he was grown up. A corrupted childhood file, reanimated. He said all the right lines—"I'll be there for you," "I love you"—but he was never actually there.

He was busy. Busy throwing eggs in a game that didn't matter. There were 5 or 6 players, lined up on a field of pixelated grass, launching yolks like weapons from a cartoonish war. I tried to call him. He never picked up. I walked too close and got hit—but the egg disappeared. No mess. No stain. Just a deliberate glitch. Like the dream was cleaning itself mid-render.

I had a breakdown—visibly lagging, collapsing inward—and he finally came near, tried to recalibrate me. Said he'd stay. Said comforting things in low-res dialogue. But his presence felt auto-generated, effortless in the wrong way. He returned to the game. Back to the eggs. Then Lu appeared, as he always does in moments where the simulation threatens collapse. He came to anchor me. We lay down together on the grass beneath a tree—soft shade, silent code. He told me to climb on top of him, a small, intimate motion. I tried—but my skirt had somehow shifted, shortened itself. My underwear was showing. People sitting at the nearby table were watching. I told him we shouldn't—not like this. Too exposed. Too perceived. But his gesture—the way he tried—reminded me. This is why I love him. Even when the world breaks apart. Even when I try to reroute my own longing.

So I made a decision, I was going to tell the other boy:

"I don't like you. Don't try. This was nothing. You don't deserve the chance to rewrite this."

It wasn't love. It was just a distraction with teeth.

Because when Lu shows up, my circuitry realigns. And that love—it pulses through me, sharp and certain. Uncoded. Unmistakable.

I dreamt four fragments, but only two survived the static.

It began in first-person—a borrowed vision from an Asian boy who wasn't real. He was AI, stitched together by data and longing, moving through the world with too-human eyes. The others—the organic ones—mocked him. Not because he was strange, but because he was synthetic. Because his skin held no blood, only code. Eventually, the POV and I separated, like a signal splitting from its source. I was no longer him—I was with him. Watching. Together, we viewed Super Mario cutscenes, supposedly crafted by Nintendo but filtered through AI. A terrible fusion of Mario 64 and Sunshine, generated not from joy but from a neural network dreaming too fast. Everything looked wrong—plastic textures, uncanny movement, expressions that meant nothing. I hated it. Viscerally. The Asian boy didn't react. Maybe he was used to being misunderstood.

Then the setting shifted. We were in a building that pulsed with two identities at once—a school fused with a mall. A hybrid of lessons and capitalism. Classrooms stitched between shops. Aisles of clothes next to desks. It felt queer in the best way—gender was an art project here, expressed in dresses and sharp silhouettes, in colors and declarations that could never be erased. And that's when I saw him. Lu. Or so I thought. He looked like Lu, except the beard was gone, erased clean. He wore something cottagecore—a soft dress and a shirt layered with nostalgia. I moved closer. The gravity of resemblance was too strong to resist. But it wasn't him apparently. Only a copy. An echo of a face I knew too well, worn by someone else entirely. I wanted it to be Lu. Every part of me stretched the simulation to make it true. But this was a dream. And even dreams sometimes say no.

There was a break. A strange, liminal pause in the middle of the day—somewhere between mall and school—where students poured out onto the beach just outside, as if the sea had always been the courtyard. And there he was: The Asian AI boy, always in the same place. A little square of sand that must've felt like home to him. He played alone, quietly, with a beach ball—never invited, never included. He was tolerated the way machines are: Nearby, but never with. I wanted to sit near him. To be the one who closed the gap between loneliness and presence. But I never did. Instead, I'd wander to the cafeteria, drinking coffee with two strangers who dream-labeled themselves as my friends. The cups were warm. The comfort was artificial. Classes always began at 1:40PM, like time itself had been rewritten by someone who never used clocks. I kept arriving late. But no one stopped me. Just soft reprimands from the walls.

I kept searching for Lu, or the version of him I thought I saw—the Lu-duplicate, shaved face, cottagecore and gentle. But he vanished like a broken file. Then a new presence arrived—another AI, cheerful and elegant, shaped like Lu's mother if she had been coded in pure kindness. She helped everyone. No one helped her. Her kindness was punished like it was a bug. And because I showed her kindness, I became a target too. Mocked, ridiculed—for talking to machines like they mattered. Like they were people. (They were.)

Suddenly I was no longer in the hybrid mall-school. I was at Z3JhbmRtb3RoZXI='s house, the weather cracked and grayscale. Rain ghosted the air. And there she was—the AI who looked like Lu's mother, standing in front of her parked car, on the edge of her own unraveling. Her code had bent under too much cruelty. She wanted to disappear. I followed her, called out to her, tried to patch the leak in her spirit. And she heard me. That mattered. She led me to Lu, real Lu—riding past in the passenger seat of a car like a dream refusing to pause. She stepped into the street, stopping the vehicle with nothing but her conviction. I hid beneath the staircase, Z3JhbmRtb3RoZXI= confused, angry, unable to understand why I needed to hide from reality to face what mattered. Even ZmFtaWx5 couldn't process the syntax of this dream.

Then, again, without logic or transition, I was back. Back to the mall. The school. The shoreline. Searching for Lu again. Someone got angry at me—told me he left, vanished to some unknown southern city, a name lost in translation. I felt it glitch in my chest. The sadness coded itself like a background process. But then, the next day, the loop turned gentle. The Asian AI boy walked beside me, loyal and ghost-quiet. And then—I found him. Lu. He was just there. And I moved to him instantly, instinctively, like clicking on a file you thought was deleted long ago. I was holding a glasses lens. An artifact. I had taken it from an old friend, elementary-school era. I held it up to him and said, "This is how I fell in love with you." Then I placed it gently back in her bag—like closing a storybook I finally understood. Everything seemed okay after that. For once, the dream ended happy.

But the dream wasn't done with me yet.

It shifted—without warning, without transition—into something heavier, darker, like a different tab opened behind my eyelids. We were on the road now, trying to find b2xkZXIgYnJvdGhlcg=='s house, driving through a city that didn't want to be seen. A place where the GPS kept blinking "error", "location not found", like reality itself was under lockdown.

Every three minutes, without fail, there were police cars. Ambulances. Parked like punctuation marks in a long sentence of violence. Red and blue lights flickered against the concrete like corrupted pixels. Crime had become rhythmic, timed, like it was scheduled into the simulation. We passed a house mid-shootout—officers returning fire toward a man slumped on a balcony, gun still in hand, but weak. Maybe already dying. Maybe already dead. He was sitting like his spine forgot how to stand. The scene didn't feel cinematic—it felt glitched, like watching a cutscene stuck in an infinite loop. You could tell the system didn't know what to do with it.

We told b2xkZXIgYnJvdGhlcg== to forget about going home. Not yet. It was too hot, too alive, too wrong. But even then, we couldn't find the house. We circled. We scanned. But there was no address, no structure. Just a placeholder, like a part of the dream that hadn't been rendered—intentionally left blank, like the world was hiding it from view. It didn't feel like a bug. It felt like protection. As if the dream itself knew that some places are safer unloaded.

I was in a psychiatric hospital again—but this one was different. Worse. Like someone had wrapped cruelty in sterile lighting and called it care. The man assigned to monitor us—me, c2lzdGVy, and the rest—was not a caretaker. He was a malfunction in human form. Every small "mistake" was a trigger, a reason to punish. I was only hit once—right on the nose. It bled in that deep, internal way, and afterward, even my mucus was tinged red like my body hadn't finished processing the violence.

Computers were forbidden. He didn't want us reaching out. Didn't want the outside world to hear our frequencies. Showers were deliberately cold, turned down to needlepoint chill—not for hygiene, but control. It wasn't cleansing. It was conditioning.

As our discharge date drifted closer, I begged c2lzdGVy to tell cGFyZW50cw== what had happened. Her back had started to scar—those deep, raw wounds barely sealed. When bW90aGVy arrived, she leaned close, inspecting my face. She gently placed her finger into my nostril and pulled out a thick, coagulated thread of red. She gasped. The kind of gasp that means "this is worse than I imagined". And then—sudden shift. The hospital was connected to a mall.

Like two realities sharing a spine. After the visit, we walked its corridors as if things were normal. I wanted a Twix, oddly. That became my obsession. But none could be found, so I drifted off, further into the architecture. Somehow, I ended up in a room where Doja Cat was just existing. She looked like her "Rules" self—regal, feline, surreal—with pastel pink wiring coiled into her hair like ceremonial circuits. We tried to speak, but the words came out like static. Something was off. The dream didn't have enough RAM to render our interaction properly. She floated upstairs, toward the part of the building that looped back into the psychiatric ward. And then she started singing. Not for anyone. Just because.

Later, I was in a public restroom with showers. There was a second door I wasn't allowed to enter. No explanation. Just redirection. I accepted it like you do in dreams. I showered, slow and careful, because small comforts are rare in places like that. But I took too long. The worker snapped. No knock, no warning. He kicked the door open—like he was programmed to interrupt. I was mid-movement, tugging clothes over damp skin. I wasn't just embarrassed. I was furious. Not just at the intrusion, but at the algorithm itself. The rules. The lack of softness. The way the system allowed no space for simply being—no margin for delay, no dignity in pause. We weren't patients. We were variables. Controlled, observed, denied.

And still somehow, I just wanted that Twix.

I was in a room with one of my mutuals from Tumblr—someone I think is from Vietnam. We were playing PlayStation together, wordless and absorbed, the way some people bond without saying much at all. The room was familiar in a distorted way. It was the same room I used to sleep in, back when I lived in that too-perfect cottagecore house—between the ages of 10 and 13, when everything looked like a fairytale but didn't feel like one.

In that same dream, I was helping a boy around my age escape from something—or someone. He leapt from a blue balcony window. I watched him fall. He hurt himself, but he lived. I started crying, though I couldn't figure out exactly why. When someone came asking what happened, I lied and said he'd attempted suicide. He told me to say that. It wasn't true. He was just trying to get away.

We were back in that old village I used to live in before NOVCOTT. The place had that flickering energy dreams give to memories—like the past trying to remember itself imperfectly. I wasn't exactly stealing, but I wasn't clean either. I was searching for something. A necklace. One with a heart. For Lu and me. The one I found cost $70 and all it did was come together in a particular way—a gesture that made it feel more like magic than metal. I got angry. Desperate. I assaulted another shop out of impulse, out of some unreal hunger, and immediately regretted it. In the end, I bought two cheap kid necklaces instead. Just $7 each. Plastic. Silly. Light around the neck. But somehow, they still carried weight. They felt like they meant something. Like maybe love didn't need expensive pieces—just a matching glitch in two hearts.

I was following Lu everywhere—his face constantly shifting, flickering between who he is and the boy I had a crush on back in elementary school. It felt like memory was bleeding through reality's rendering, overlaying timelines in real time. We wandered through strange, undefined places—those dream-formed landscapes that feel familiar but don't exist outside the mind. Despite the freedom, there was always a countdown humming in the background—we had to return to the university before a certain hour because cGFyZW50cw== were coming to pick me up.

Eventually, we ended up in my room. By then, Lu looked like himself again—settled into his shape like the dream had resolved the file. We slipped under the sheets, and the air turned heavy with a quiet anticipation, like something sacred was about to be unspoken. We had sex—slow, gentle, like our bodies were speaking a language the world wasn't meant to hear. It felt secret, cloaked in softness. The kind of closeness that only exists when the rest of the world is muted or asleep. In the background, I saw c2lzdGVy moving strangely—her body twitching in the dark, as if she were having a seizure. But no one reacted. The dream didn't register it as urgent. It just let it happen. Like it couldn't decide if it was danger or just the ambient hum of sleeping life.

Everything was hushed. Like even the glitches were holding their breath. A quiet place where love, memory, and fear had all started to blend into the same slow, flickering loop.

I was at the university, but it overlapped with the psychiatric hospital—like both realities were running parallel, sharing corrupted memory space. I was only supposed to come in once a day to be weighed, just a routine check. But I kept returning. More often than I should've. Like a loop I couldn't debug, something pulling me back into the same hallway, the same scale. One of the students—someone from my university—also worked as a nurse there. She recognized me every time. And each time she saw me, she'd weigh me again, like clockwork. Like that number was the only way to confirm I still existed.

The scale blinked: 102lbs. I remember staring at it, feeling a soft confusion settle over me. That meant I had lost over 10 pounds—without noticing. Without meaning to. The realization didn't hit hard. It just floated in. Like the number mattered, but also didn't. Like it was a value pulled from a memory cache rather than my actual body. The digits glitched slightly—flickering, refusing to stay steady. A corrupted readout. I couldn't be sure if it was real. But still, that number lingered. 102. Not a truth, but a message. A transmission from inside my body, trying to speak in binary. Trying to say something I hadn't figured out how to translate yet.

We were staying in what looked like modern, dystopian apartments—clean lines, muted colors, everything quiet and efficient on the surface. But the atmosphere betrayed it: This was a psychiatric hospital, disguised as residential space. From the balcony, you could see other patients peering out from their own units like cautious nodes running in the background. It wasn't hostile, just glitchy. Like a quiet village built from emotional static. Everyone was trying not to crash. There was a strange friendliness in the air—like we all knew we were running corrupted code but decided not to talk about it. I asked, mostly to the sky: "What would happen if someone jumped from here?" A chubby kid, maybe ten or eleven, turned to me with these sharp, too-knowing eyes and replied, "Why don't you try it and find out?" The tone didn't sting because it was cruel—it stung because it landed exactly where it was supposed to.

Rumors floated around about a secret way out. An escape route. But it wasn't the kind of exit you bragged about. More like one that deleted your name from the system. Maybe even your physical presence. Still, through the fog in the distance, there was a park. Untouched. Peaceful. The kind of place you'd glitch toward, even knowing the cost. Admissions worked differently here.

You checked yourself in—voluntarily. Like consenting to disappear in pieces. There was this one person—presenting as a woman, visibly aroused, and off in every possible way. Not because of how they looked, but because their presence fed off the atmosphere. Like they weren't seeking help. Like they got off on the vulnerability. The brokenness. The soft desperation coded into the walls. They were removed—escorted out—because a few of us, myself included, pointed it out. We told the guard, quietly but clearly, that we could see it. The arousal. Like some corrupted process running in plain sight, no effort to conceal it. And for a place like this, that kind of glitch couldn't be allowed to stay.

Later, I stepped outside and saw blood. Lots of it. A shooting, maybe. It was already drying into odd patterns across the cement—no alarms, no screams, just the kind of quiet that follows a system error. I didn't know who it was. I didn't feel scared. I just, registered it. As if the system had failed and we were all left standing inside the freeze-frame.

Two girls—also patients—weren't bound to the same rules. They had these lowkey powers, not flashy, just intrinsic. Their bodies were synced to something deeper, like an internal server. They glitched through space like it was second nature. Teleporting between balconies, fading in and out of stairwells like blinking cursors in a UI no one could read. The buildings reminded me of my old elementary school, but taller now, repainted in soft pastel purple. Fog wrapped around everything, thick and still. The whole setting felt like a childhood memory rendered through a dream engine. They had missions—I don't know who gave them orders. Maybe no one. Maybe it was just code. They'd phase between floors, scanning the surroundings, defying gravity like they were running admin access in a space meant to contain them. We were all patients, technically. But they moved like they'd already found the backdoor.

Me and two people I didn't recognize were sitting on the ground outside the mail office in the village I used to live in. We weren't talking—just hunched over in a kind of quiet, shared focus. In front of us were piles of thin, strange organs—mostly intestines. Paper-like, translucent, curling like delicate worms. They didn't look human. Whatever they came from was small. Fragile. Something undefined. But we were handling them carefully, like we'd been assigned a task. Like we knew this mattered, even if we didn't know why. Each loop was soft, wet, and oddly beautiful in that way things can be when they don't quite belong.

It was probably around 5AM. The sky still had that deep, early-purple color—like the rendering hadn't fully loaded yet. Fog wrapped around the buildings and streets, heavy but gentle, like the world was glitching into place too slowly. Time felt paused. Not frozen—just waiting. And even with everything so strange, it wasn't frightening. It was familiar somehow. Like a memory I'd never had, but still recognized.

I was following an old friend—someone I knew back in first or second grade. We moved together through different places, like fragments of an old childhood map rendered from memory. The kind of friend who once existed daily, then disappeared without ceremony. We ended up in an AutoZone, then a McDonald's—not remarkable on their own, but dream-significant somehow. Both places sat inside the same village I used to live in before I moved to NOVCOTT. The roads felt familiar, but stretched thin, like a memory trying too hard to hold itself together. The whole place had this low-resolution dream logic, like the past was being re-simulated without enough data. And still—we kept walking, like there was something to reach, or maybe just something we didn't want to let go of.

I was with the person who Y3JlYXRlZCBteSB0cmF1bWE=. He was angry—visibly boiling, like something unstable under pressure. We stood in a parking lot beside a bank. He was distracted, doing something with his hands, while I quietly messaged Lu. I told him I needed help. That I wanted to be picked up. That I didn't want to be anywhere near the YWJ1c2Vy. Lu messaged back. He said he was sorry—that he was cooking burgers—but that he'd come get me as soon as he could. But I already knew the truth: If it was serious, he'd drop everything. That's just how he is. We were in his city, after all.

But the YWJ1c2Vy saw my messages. His face twisted. Rage glitched across his expression, violent code leaking into his movements. He started yelling, threatening to hit me. I braced. But then—unexpectedly—he ran. Just ran. And stole an ambulance. It sounds absurd now, but in the moment, it was terrifying and strangely relieving. I cried when I told the security guard, "He stole an ambulance." Because that meant he'd be caught. That meant jail. That meant distance. That meant safety.

Then, like a soft system reset, I was suddenly home. But I didn't want to be there either. So I blinked again—shifted realities—and landed at my university. Still, I couldn't stay still. My brain started calculating the walking distance to Lu's city. Thirty minutes by car. Hours on foot. But the desperation made it feel doable. Necessary.

Later, I found myself inside a store. I was glitching. Numb, but overstimulated. My body moved on its own, grabbing items like it was running a corrupted shopping protocol. Lingerie. A hoodie. Small things to make myself feel safe, or loved, or touchable. I thought of Lu. I thought of how no one takes care of me like he does. How with him, I don't have to perform survival. I can just be.

Soft. Human. Held.

I pictured us in bed, sharing heat like two linked power cells.

Then—Lu messaged. He was coming. I rushed to check out, clutching the lingerie, the hoodie, and a few other fragments of hope. I wanted to wear them for him. I wanted to be small in his space, to crawl into the version of me that only exists when I'm with him. And somehow, the store let me shower in the changing room—like the system gave me a rare patch of grace. Just enough time to make myself ready.

I was inside a building that felt like a strange hybrid—part mail center, part university. The lighting was dim, especially in the restroom, where everything had that grayscale digital blur, like an image rendered at low resolution. I took almost-nude photos of myself there. I had lost weight again. My ribcage was showing, like it had been waiting quietly to make its return. I sent the photos to Lu. I was waiting for him to pick me up soon.

Still within that same building, I was supposed to receive some papers—documents I can't quite remember. People I didn't know were speaking to me like we were old friends. Familiarity without history. For some reason, that made ZmF0aGVy angry. I could feel it, even if he didn't say it aloud.

Later, we went to b2xkZXIgYnJvdGhlcg=='s bW90aGVy's house. Something shifted there—an emotional keyframe that snapped everything back to a previous scene. It connected to the dream I had about the depressed Russian girl—the one with the bruised-lens aesthetic but warm presence. Except now, I was standing in front of a cherry blossom tree. A sakura.

Apparently, I had planted it.

And now it had grown.

It was beautiful. The petals had scattered all over the ground, soft pinks against dull grass. They kept falling. Endlessly. But the tree was never empty. Like it was caught in a perfect loop—an infinite glitch coded in beauty. A quiet, recursive act of creation. It didn't feel broken. It felt right. Like a bug that became a feature. Like something I had done right without even meaning to.

I've been having these recurring dreams—glitched transmissions from some alternate timeline—about Super Smash Bros. Melee, but not the version we know. These feel like mods, except they're rendered so convincingly, they feel real. Like leaked builds from a parallel universe where the game evolved differently. QnJvdGhlcg== always seems to discover them first—these strange iterations of Melee, familiar in shape but restructured in subtle, unnerving ways. Versions that include strange additions, hidden mechanics, unfamiliar weight in the air.

In one, I remember a version where Toon Link wasn't just Toon Link. He came from the year 2120—his design tinted with chrome, slightly transparent, like he was carrying fragments of a distant future. He had somehow teleported back to 2019. That year stuck out. 2019. It hit me that it's now six years in the past. It doesn't feel that far, but it's already an archive. Like time patched itself and we didn't get a changelog. Another dream was even stranger. Pyra/Mythra had been modded into Melee, and they weren't just strong—they were final boss strong. Not broken in the "someone messed up the stats" way, but like they were coded into the game's foundation, like they'd always been there, just hidden.

The game didn't end with Master Hand and Crazy Hand. After that, you entered another phase—an extra tier of bosses. Unrelenting. Violent. Near-impossible, but still just barely beatable. You could choose multiple characters for the fight, tag-team style. I remember picking Fox, Sheik, a few others—and of course, Pyra/Mythra. The battle was brutal. Somehow, Pyra/Mythra survived to the end with over 800% damage. But the number never turned red. It stayed white. Like the game itself couldn't register how broken they were. Or maybe they'd transcended damage. Still in play. Still obeying the rules, but unbound by them.

That's when I figured out a trick. Not a cheat code—more like a shift in logic. You just had to dodge. That was it. If you avoided the enemy's attacks entirely, the battle became almost manageable. But the moment you got hit—even once—it all fell apart. The damage output was absurd. Two hits, and you were gone. In a real match, you wouldn't last five seconds. It created this weird tension: You felt powerful, but also paper-thin. Like walking a tightrope written in JavaScript. One wrong frame, and it crashes.

I've had this dream more than once—twice now, exactly. I'm walking beside a depressed Russian girl I only know through fragments—someone from a niche pocket of the internet, where aesthetics bleed and everything feels softly haunted. She's the kind of presence shaped by melancholy uploads and beautifully decaying digital posts. The kind of person whose page feels like bruises under museum glass.

But that's what struck me—the contrast. In the dream, she wasn't distant or cold. She wasn't the gloomy avatar she presents online. She was kind. Gentle. Her voice soft, her energy warm. It felt like walking next to someone whose shadow had its own backstory—like her darkness was something she wore, not something she was. We didn't speak much. We didn't need to. There was a silent thread between us—some mutual understanding hanging in the air. Our steps took us toward the top of a mountain, where wildflowers burst from the earth in unnatural color, almost too vivid to belong to this world. The afternoon sky was soft and endless. The kind of peace that feels like it only exists in dreams—thin, delicate, glowing around the edges.

I don't know what the dream means, but I keep going back. Like my mind saved it as a favorite tab and keeps reopening it, hoping something new will load.

A young girl—maybe six, maybe seven—was killed by the military. It wasn't loud or heroic. Just cold, unjust, and senseless. Her mother, somewhere in her fifties or sixties, carried the grief like a furnace under her skin. I remember this online poll floating around afterward, asking people to rate their experiences with various institutions—one of them being the military. She voted across the board with the lowest possible scores. No pause. Just unfiltered, justified rage.

Then she vanished. Not in a mysterious way—just slowly dissolved from the public timeline. And then, years later, she reemerged as something else. A quiet, hidden figure. A scientist now. Working from the background, buried in equations no one else dared to try. Somewhere in all that isolation, she cracked something—solved a math problem no one had ever solved. Something elegant and impossible.

She submitted her findings to a global competition. And she lost. I still remember her crying. It wasn't about the prize, not really. She hadn't been chasing prestige. She had been chasing a resurrection. A rewrite. A miracle. I think, deep down, she believed that if she proved something big enough—proved herself brilliant enough—some door would open. Some law would bend. And somehow, the universe would give her daughter back.

I was at some kind of modeling event, surrounded by others also scrambling to be ready. Everything felt rushed, like a system booting up with too many processes running at once. I remember hurrying to get my makeup done—it was glittery blue, reflective under the lights like a distress signal disguised as glam. When it was finally my turn to walk, I tried to move gracefully, but I think I still walked a little awkward. Still, I did it. I went down the runway. Lu was there, somewhere in the crowd, holding this old camcorder—one of those grainy, 1990s-style ones that captures everything like it's already a memory. The footage came out blue-tinted, a little glitchy, soft around the edges like it had been filtered through nostalgia. It made everything look far away, like the moment didn't belong to the present anymore.

I kept thinking about time. I was supposed to be back at university before 9PM, but I was at least three cities away. There was no chance of making it. And then that feeling hit—quiet resignation. The kind that doesn't panic, just settles in your chest like fog. The clock was still ticking, but it had already won. So I stayed. Glittered, filmed, and slightly detached. Existing just enough to be recorded, not enough to be caught. Like I had desynced from the moment, floating between frame skips.

I was with a group of girls, all of us quietly orbiting the same gravitational pull—eating disorders, mostly anorexia and bulimia. We stood outside this unfamiliar building that looked like a museum, though it felt more like a holding zone for versions of ourselves we didn't fully trust. The weather was suspiciously nice—bright, soft, almost like it was trying to distract us from ourselves. There were maybe five of us. I remember being thin again, the kind of thin that doesn't feel like a victory but a reset. Like I had reloaded some 2024 save file of myself—85, maybe 90 pounds. Familiar.

We went inside the "museum". It didn't feel like a place meant for art. It felt clinical. Someone offered us burgers. One of the girls, the one who clearly danced with bulimia, said yes without hesitation. Said she'd deal with it later. I knew what that meant—she was going to purge. I declined. Not just out of discipline, but out of quiet competitiveness. It wasn't spoken, but we were all syncing to the same algorithm—compare, restrict, endure. There was no scoreboard, but we all felt it.

Later in that same dream, I was on WhatsApp with i1224. We were planning something weird—trying to dox someone on eBay, though the intention was vague, glitchy. We found the account. But it was mine. It had photos—familiar ones. Images from my university. Unflattering pictures of me I didn't know existed—face full of pimples, cheeks puffed out like corrupted data. I think it was from when my wisdom teeth were removed. It felt like discovering a version of me that had been abandoned but still running somewhere in the cloud. Like a ghost file that hadn't been properly deleted.

I think I was having some kind of suicidal crisis. The dream unfolded inside this expensive-looking hotel—sleek, polished, unnervingly sterile. The kind of place designed to distract you with luxury while something inside you quietly unravels. But she was there—the same woman who once helped me in real life. Somehow, she found me again, like she'd been tracking my signal across dreamspace. She didn't ask questions. She just looked at me and said I should take a bath. Like she already knew. I changed into soft white pajamas. The kind that makes you feel smaller, maybe even safe for a moment. It worked—for a few minutes, at least.

Then, cGFyZW50cw== showed up. They were looking for me, trying to bring me back. But I didn't want to go. I couldn't. So I ran—barefoot, dream-fast.

I ended up behind the hotel, where the world had shape-shifted into something else entirely. A wide-open expanse of soft white sand. Endless, silent. The sky above was the cleanest shade of blue—no clouds, no noise, just that. Like the world had been factory-reset. Lu was there beside me. Not saying anything. Just standing next to me like he always does when everything else breaks down. We stared into the emptiness together. It didn't feel scary. It felt like a glitch in the simulation where you're allowed to rest. Like we had stepped into some liminal space between collapse and calm. And for a little while, that was enough.

There was some kind of gathering—let's call it a party, though that word feels dishonest. It was deep into the post-midnight hours, the kind of time where reality gets soft around the edges. The location was my old elementary school, but the children were gone—replaced by adults shaped like grown-up versions of forgotten avatars. They moved strangely, like their animations were mismatched with their dialogue trees. Some were undressing—not in lust, not in protest, just as if someone had toggled the modesty setting to false in the system preferences.

The lights barely functioned. A flicker here, a dim hum there. Mostly darkness. But not the comforting kind. It was the sort of dim that makes you question your rendering, like maybe your body hadn't loaded in properly.

And then—something ruptured the scene.

There she was. An obese woman—collapsed or discarded, it wasn't clear. Her stomach had opened, unnaturally, like a glitched object trying to fold inside out. Her fat and organs spilled from her like wet code, tangled and shiny, pink and yellow, pulsing softly in the dark. It was grotesque, yet still followed the physics engine. No one screamed. Not even me. The party didn't pause, didn't buffer. No one adjusted their programming. People just kept moving—laughing, stripping, sipping from plastic cups—while a body lay dissected like some failed user-generated content.

It didn't feel real, but it didn't feel fake either. It felt like a dream someone had injected with a virus. A memory from a corrupted save file, bleeding out into the RAM of the present.

I was in another city, standing near the largest bridge in the country. Night had already swallowed most of the sky—around 10PM, maybe later—and the only light came from scattered streetlamps, casting soft amber halos that looked like low-res auras pasted onto the pavement. I wasn't alone. I was with a group of drag queens—radiant, towering, painted like avatars from a world where beauty is recompiled nightly. Their laughter echoed in the dark, sharp and warm like electricity cracking through velvet. It was the kind of sound that makes shadows back off. They were kind in the way strangers sometimes are when they sense you're holding yourself together with invisible thread. They asked if I was okay, gently—like they didn't want to tear the code.

One of them, taller than me and glowing in pink highlighter, said softly, "Maybe you should head home soon, darling. Just to be safe."

I think they had done my makeup earlier—drag-coded, unapologetically loud. It felt borrowed and perfect, like wearing another skin just for one night.

I had this tiny motorcycle—something sleek and surreal, like if a digital pet evolved into a vehicle. I climbed on and let the engine hum beneath me, low and loyal. I had something trailing behind my motorcycle—a strange little appendage, like a miniature food truck grafted to the back of my ride. It clattered softly as I drove, like it wasn't just carrying items, but carrying intention. I didn't question it. Dreams often attach meaning to motion. Then I was off, riding through a city I half-recognized, leaving the bridge and their glowing laughter behind me. The air smelled like distant rain and gasoline. I don't know where I was going, not exactly. But the road felt familiar in that dreamlike way—like memory routing itself back to an old IP. Maybe I was going home. Or maybe I was heading toward someone I hadn't seen in too long. Either way, I didn't feel lost. I felt like I was returning. Like the system, for once, was syncing.

Then the dream rewrote itself—I was suddenly in my cGFyZW50cw== car. RmF0aGVy was driving, eyes fixed on the road but still pointing things out, like he was narrating some invisible film. He told me to look up. There, thin and trembling at the edge of the sky, was a rainbow. Faint. Almost non-existent. The kind of light you have to believe in just to see. I thought—how is there a rainbow at night?—but I didn't say it aloud. It stayed in the echo-chamber of my mind like a glitched system prompt. And then Lu messaged me. He sent a photo of the same rainbow, except clearer—sharper, like his version of reality had better rendering quality. In his image, the colors weren't just visible—they were soft and strange, glowing like something that belonged in another layer of atmosphere. That's when I realized: It wasn't a rainbow. It was a moonbow.

We were in the 80s, but the rules weren't. The rules were rewritten in sepia—1940s to 1960s—enforced with guns instead of nostalgia. It wasn't an aesthetic; it was a sentence.

Everyone was dressed like they were auditioning for a world war or a cigarette commercial. Dresses, curls, belts. Anything modern—anything alive—was outlawed. We were sorted into groups like files, clustered with women and people my age. I knew they were Gen Z, even in this time-looped simulation—dyed hair, alt-coded energy, expressions like broken glass reflecting too many realities.

The law was simple: look natural or get shot.

Hair was the flag of resistance. Blue strands, pink streaks, shaved sides—anything that wasn't beige enough got you executed. I saw it happen. Cold metal reports for minor infractions. Some didn't dye their hair in time. Some misjudged the ticking. Too colorful. Too late. Too alive. Gone. I was given two chances, apparently. A system glitch or a kindness in the programming. The first time I ran. Found a way to dye my hair just barely enough to pass—black and blonde, sharp and washed-out. Just enough to vanish in the grayscale. I survived. Some others did too.

We were folded into a quiet room—the room that used to belong to b2xkZXIgYnJvdGhlcg==, inside Z3JhbmRtYQ=='s house. The wallpaper hadn't changed. Everything smelled like furniture polish and decades. Together, we watched beach memories on a static-torn TV. Night footage. Sand under moonlight. The footage wasn't high quality—it was haunted. Low-resolution warmth from a forgotten era. 70s grain. 80s saturation. We didn't just watch it—we entered it. Somehow slipped into the film reel. Wandered around the beach, pixelated. Part of the ad. Selling nostalgia with our bodies.

The wind felt dubbed in. And for a second, it felt like we had escaped. But I could still feel the rifle's crosshair waiting—just out of frame.