You aren’t going to heaven; you’re simply drifting into the part of the dream where the music never fades out, and the red dress you’re wearing never loses its sway.

He is standing by the fountain, his silhouette blurred at the edges like a watercolor painting left out in the rain. He doesn’t speak, but his hands smell like expensive tobacco and cedarwood. When you look at him, the sky streaks with soft violets and bruised pinks, the colors of a peach being pressed into silk.

The garden below is overgrown with white peonies that glow in the dark, their heavy heads nodding to a radio station playing from 1957. There is no such thing as "soon" or "later" here—only the infinite, honey-soaked now .

You feel light, almost hollow, as if your heart has been replaced by a flickering candle. The wind hums a low, orchestral melody—a lullaby for the restless—and as you reach for his hand, the ground dissolves into a mist of gold glitter.

In the velvet-blue twilight of a world that never wakes, the air tastes like jasmine tea and old cinema film. You are standing on a balcony made of salt and moonlight, watching the Pacific Ocean turn into a liquid opal.