This is Just a Dream

Chapter 13

The semester had resumed, but Eden felt like an anthropologist studying a primitive, alien culture.

She sat in the back row of a lecture hall that smelled faintly of dry-erase markers and floor wax. At the front of the room, a professor was waxing poetic about Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, but to Eden, the words were just vibrations in the air, disconnected from any sense of meaning. Her classmates—young women with bright eyes, neatly organized binders, and worries about upcoming exams—seemed to belong to a different species. They talked about sorority formals and internships as if the world were a fixed, reliable place that would be there tomorrow. As if there weren't men and women right now giving their lives, fighting for them to have the privileges. She hoped and prayed that their happiness was never dulled or ruined by an unexpected knock on their door letting them know that their entire heart had been ripped from their chest.

Eden looked down at her own notebook. The pages were blank, save for a few stray, frantic doodles of jagged lines and mountains.

She wasn't living; this wasn't living, she was existing in the static between channels. Every aspect of her life had been meticulously restored to its original state, but the structure was empty. She went to class, she went to her shifts at the campus library, she ate when her body demanded sustenance, and she slept—if it could be called that—in the hollow, silent space of her bed. But the Eden who had been vibrant, who had been fueled by the dream of a classroom full of children, had been left behind in that desert valley.

The detachment was a physical sensation, a thick, invisible glass wall that separated her from the rest of humanity. When her friends reached out, their voices sounded tiny and far away, like radio broadcasts from an impossible distance. When she walked across campus, the sun felt cold on her skin, and the laughter of students felt like a jarring, discordant note in a world that she knew, in her marrow, to be fundamentally broken. When she closed her eyes all she saw was Adam laying there alone, in the sand and rocks, without her, calling her name with blood on his hands and there was nothing that she could do. She would wake up in a cold sweat, shaking and crying.

That night, the apartment was a tomb.

It was 3:14 AM. The digital clock on her nightstand glowed with a harsh, neon-blue intensity, its relentless march forward serving as a taunt. The air in the room was stagnant, heavy with the phantom scent of old dust and the lingering, spectral presence of Adam’s absence.

She lay on her back, staring at the ceiling, her heart beating with a slow, heavy, irregular rhythm. She had tried to read, she had tried to clean, she had even tried to play some of the music they used to listen to—a desperate attempt to trigger a memory that felt like more than a photograph—but everything had backfired. The music had only underscored the silence; the books had only highlighted the futility.

The grief, which usually manifested as a dull, constant ache, had sharpened into something feral. It was a cold, constricting pressure in her chest, a physical manifestation of the fact that she was still here, in this room, on this earth, while he was nowhere. His things were there, his scent was there. Pieces of him were everywhere but he wasn't.

Look after you by Aron Aright played low in the darkness of her room. Adam was still there, always giving her signs from the beyond.

She sat up, the sheets pooling around her waist. She felt a sudden, frantic need to breathe, she couldn't breathe, to connect with someone who understood the architecture of this specific agony. She didn't want comfort; she didn't want platitudes. She wanted to stand in the wreckage with someone else who had seen the explosion.

Her phone lay on the bedside table, a black slab of glass reflecting the moonlight. She picked it up, her thumbs hovering over the screen. She navigated to the contact she had saved that day at the cemetery: Garrett H.

She hadn't spoken to him since the funeral. She knew he had returned to the field, back to the deployments, the rotations, the relentless, grinding cycle of the service. She had imagined him in the same environments that had claimed Adam—the heat, the dust, the tension, the camaraderie, the deaths.

She shouldn't call. He was a commander. He was a man who lived under the weight of his own losses, a man who had his own perimeter to keep, who was she to him but just another woman who lost something to the war.

But the silence was screaming at her.

Her thumbs began to move, the text appearing in the message box, the letters stark and white against the dark background.

I can’t do this, she typed.

She paused, her breath hitching. She deleted the words. They were too generic, too small for the sheer, cavernous reality of her existence.

She exited the messages and decided to call Adams phone, it went to his voicemail.

“It's Adam, leave a message and I'll get back to you when I can” and then she heard herself laugh in the background and then Adam laugh, deep and hearty. She had forgotten that that was his voicemail. She smiled through her tears and agony.

“I’m in the apartment, and it’s quiet, and I keep waiting for you to tell me it’s going to be okay, but I know it isn't. I keep looking at your things. I wear your shirts and I spray your cologne on the pillow. If I can fall asleep fast enough then sometimes it feels like you're still here, next to me. But then I wake up and it's cold and empty. You left me. You made me love you so much that it's near impossible to breathe without you, you know. I love you Adam, I love you so much and I don't know what I'm doing without you. I can't do it.” she sobbed into the phone and hung up.

She stared at the screen, her heart hammering against her ribs and she got back onto the messages.

When does it stop hurting? She typed out.

She was projecting her madness onto a man who was probably thousands of miles away, likely standing watch on a ridge or reviewing mission parameters. He wouldn't care. He was a soldier, and she was a civilian relic of a past that he had been forced to witness.

She started to close the app, to put the phone back down and surrender to the dark, when her thumb slipped.

Send.

The message vanished into the ether.

Eden stared at the screen, a hot, frantic shame washing over her. What have you done? she thought. You’ve just reached out across the world with your own selfish, broken grief, and you’ve demanded that he carry it.

She threw the phone across the room. It landed with a soft, muffled thud on the rug. She buried her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking, the tears finally, finally breaking through the wall of her detachment. She sobbed, long, ragged, unceasing sounds that felt like they were trying to tear her body apart from the inside out.

She sat there for what felt like an hour but was just minutes, the room swimming in the dark blue hues of night trying to bleed to day. She was waiting for the phone to vibrate, a sound that would acknowledge the transgression, a sound that would remind her that she was alone in this.

Then, the phone buzzed.

It was a sharp, persistent sound that seemed to slice through the heavy, oppressive silence of the room.

Eden’s breath caught in her throat. She stared at the phone on the rug, terrified to move. She had expected an apology, perhaps a reprimand, or, most likely, nothing at all.

She reached out, her fingers trembling, and picked up the phone.

The screen glowed: Garrett H.

She swiped the screen, her heart in her throat.

I’m here, the text read. I’m awake.

Eden felt a sudden, sharp, and overwhelming sense of relief. She sat on the floor, the cold hardwood floor biting into her skin, and began to type. She didn't hold back. She didn't try to be coherent. She didn't try to be the girl who was going to teach or the girl who was holding it together.

She told him about the lecture hall. She told him about the smell of the dry-erase markers. She told him about the way her clothes felt to tight on her body, the way the sound of the clock was driving her to the edge of insanity, and the way she still looked for his truck in the parking lot every single time she walked out the door. She told him about Adams cologne on her pillow and that she left him a voicemail.

She let it all pour out—a torrent of words that had been dammed up for months, a confession of the mundane, agonizing, and beautiful pieces of a life that had been severed.

She pressed Send and waited.

The reply came almost immediately, as if he had been sitting on the other side of the phone, waiting for her to speak.

It’s normal, Garrett wrote. The dissociation. The feeling like the rest of the world is a movie you’re watching from the back of the theater. You’re not broken, Eden. You’re just processing the impossible.

How do you handle it? she typed, her thumbs moving with a frantic, desperate rhythm. How do you keep standing?

I don't, Garrett replied. I just stand until I’m told to move. I focus on the next minute. Just the next minute. Don't look at the week. Don't look at the month. Just get to the next hour. You’re doing the work, Eden. Just by staying in that room, just by sitting on that floor, you’re doing the work.

Eden leaned her head against the wall, the tears continuing to track down her cheeks, but the crushing, suffocating weight in her chest had shifted. It hadn't disappeared—it would never disappear—but for the first time in months, it felt like she was sharing the load and it felt lighter.

She was in her apartment, thousands of miles away from the theater of operations..

Are you okay? she typed, the thought occurring to her for the first time that he was out there where her Adam had been taken from her and that thought flared panic. She had been so consumed by her own wreckage that she hadn't stopped to wonder what the war was doing to him.

The pause was longer this time.

I’m tired, he finally wrote. But I’m standing.

Eden closed her eyes. She felt the warmth of the phone in her hand, the steady, rhythmic light of the screen, and the presence of a man who was currently, in some distant and hostile corner of the world, keeping a promise.

The clock ticked. 3:45 AM.

The apartment was still a tomb, and the void where Adam had been was still vast and aching. But the silence had changed. It wasn't an oppressive, isolating barrier anymore. It was a space that they were sharing, two people standing in the dark, tethered by the memory of the same light.

Thank you, she typed.

Sleep, Eden, he replied. I’m still here. I’m not going anywhere.

She placed the phone on the pillow beside her. She didn't know if she would ever feel like the girl who dreamt of classrooms again. She didn't know if the world would ever regain its color or its rhythm. But as she curled into the sheets, the phantom warmth of the phone beside her, she felt a sudden, quiet sense of peace.

She closed her eyes, the echo of his words—I’m still here—the final, steady rhythm that allowed her to drift off into the first real, unbroken sleep she had known since the day the knock sounded at her door.