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‘This is what it must be like to be dead,’ she told me. ‘You see all your memories – both good and bad – turn to something that feels and looks like snow. With the next blink of an eye, the snow has hit the ground blissfully, and turned to ash.’

‘Why did you leave so young?’ I asked her. Too many questions were spilling from my mouth, with no time at all. ‘Rejection is too small an excuse to leave, don’t you think?’

‘You walk down this one path your whole existence. When the fog arrives, you look back and realize all the road signs are difficult to make out now. So you keep walking. The fog never lifts, nor do the road signs at the sides become any clearer to guide you. Eventually, you fall into a pit.’

‘You could have always gotten back up you know.’ I try to say more out of curiosity than as a hollow after thought.

She paused, smiled at me and said, ‘True. But when I fell into that abyss, looking up, I realized there was no fog to begin with. It was just that I had my eyes shut tightly all along. He and the kids had never been there too; just apparitions my fantasy concocted…I made them up inside my head.’

After the dream, the medicines they poured in my eyes didn’t do much either to unhook my lids from each other. Some are just born with their eyes shut tight, subject to nothing and no one’s ability to open them.