Dreamed You, Found You

Chapter 4 ## Obsession Begins

The notebook filled quickly.

Sari wrote every morning, before the sun was fully up, before Nenek called her to breakfast. She wrote in the dark, by the light of her phone, her thumb moving fast across the screen before she transferred the words to paper. She wrote in fragments. In colors. In feelings that had no names.

*Day four. The grey city again. He was farther today—across the street, under a different building. I could see the shape of his coat. Dark. Long. He raised his hand. I think he was waving. I couldn't tell.*

*Day five. Same distance. I tried to run toward him, but the street stretched longer every time I moved. Like the dream didn't want us to touch. He said something. I saw his lips move. Three syllables, maybe four.*

*Day six. He was closer. I saw his jaw. Sharp. The light was behind him again, but I could see the shadow of his jaw. He was looking at something in his hand—a phone? A book? I couldn't see.*

*Day seven. He laughed. I didn't hear it, but I felt it. The way his shoulders moved. The way the air changed. I laughed too. I think. I woke up smiling.*

The last entry worried her most. Smiling. She had woken up smiling from a dream about a man she had never met, a man who might not exist outside her own head.

She closed the notebook and slid it under her pillow.

---

The dreams began to leak into her days.

Not the dreams themselves—the grey city stayed in sleep. But the hunger for them followed her into the classroom, into the market, into the small kitchen where she sat with Nenek and pretended to listen to stories she had heard a hundred times before.

She caught herself staring out the window during lessons, her eyes fixed on the rice paddies while her students read aloud from their textbooks. The words floated past her. She heard them, but she didn't listen.

"Bu Guru?"

Sari blinked. A small hand waved in front of her face. Dewi, nine years old, with missing front teeth and a worried expression.

"Bu Guru, you stopped reading."

Sari looked down at the book in her hands. She had been on the same page for ten minutes.

"Sorry," she said. "Go on. Start again from the beginning."

The children exchanged glances. Dewi shrugged and continued reading about a farmer and his buffalo, and Sari tried—she really tried—to pay attention.

But her mind was already back in the grey city, standing across the street from a man whose face she couldn't see.

---

Ratna found her in the teacher's lounge at lunch, staring at a cup of cold coffee.

"You look terrible."

Ratna was twenty-five, the same age as Sari, but where Sari was soft and careful, Ratna was sharp and direct. She worked as a nurse at the village clinic, which meant she had opinions about sleep schedules, caffeine intake, and the general state of her friends' mental health.

"Thanks," Sari said.

"I mean it." Ratna sat down across from her and pushed a plate of *pisang goreng*—fried bananas—across the table. "Eat. You're losing weight."

"I'm fine."

"You're lying."

Sari took a banana and bit into it. The sugar helped. A little.

Ratna watched her with narrowed eyes, the way she watched patients who were hiding symptoms. "You've been different lately. Distracted. You're not sleeping?"

"I'm sleeping too much, if anything."

"Then what?"

Sari hesitated. She had told no one about the dreams. Not really. Nenek knew something was happening, but Nenek spoke in proverbs and left space for silence. Ratna would not leave space. Ratna would demand answers.

"I've been having strange dreams," Sari said carefully.

Ratna's eyebrows rose. "Strange how?"

"Just... strange. Vivid. I wake up tired."

"That's not strange. That's bad sleep hygiene. You need to—"

"Ratna."

"Fine, fine. Don't tell me." Ratna leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms. "But you're not yourself. And if something's wrong, you'd tell me, wouldn't you? That's what friends are for."

Sari looked down at her cold coffee. "It's nothing bad. Just... confusing."

"Confusing how?"

*I keep dreaming about the same man. I think I'm falling in love with him. And I don't even know if he's real.*

She couldn't say that out loud. It sounded insane. It *was* insane.

"Just confusing," she said again.

Ratna didn't push. She was many things—nosy, opinionated, too honest for her own good—but she knew when to stop.

"Okay," Ratna said. "But eat your bananas. And try to sleep better. And if you need to talk, I'm here. Even if it's about something weird."

Sari smiled. "Thanks."

She finished her bananas and went back to class.

The afternoon passed in a blur of multiplication tables and Javanese folk songs. She taught on autopilot, her voice steady, her hands moving across the chalkboard, her mind somewhere else entirely.

By the time the last bell rang, she was exhausted.

She walked home through the rice paddies, her sandals sinking into the wet earth. The sun was low, painting the sky orange and pink, and the air smelled of rain and mud and growing things. It was beautiful. It always was.

She barely noticed.

---

That night, she adjusted her sleep schedule.

She went to bed earlier. She set her alarm for later. She arranged her pillows in a different configuration, thinking—irrationally, she knew—that maybe the position of her head would affect the quality of her dreams.

It didn't.

But she still fell asleep hoping.

And when the grey city rose up to meet her, she was ready.

*Stay*, she thought again.

The man turned toward her.

And this time—she almost believed he smiled.