The first thing he felt was the silence.
Before he even opened his eyes, he could sense the lack of sound.
It wasn't merely quiet. It was absolute silence. A kind that didn't occur in the world he lived in.
He remained motionless, eyes closed, heart thumping with the slow beat of confusion. Mornings for the last five years had been chaos: the city bus screeching to a halt, the frustrated honking on the road below, the high-pitched fights of his neighbours, the incessant construction going on, and most of all, the ear-piercing scream of the mixer-grinder from the kitchen next door. He detested those noises, hated them. But now, in this unusual silence, he was gripped with something akin to fear.
Where was the noise?
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling had vanished.
So had the fan, with its slow-turning blades and cobweb trail. The walls of his single-room apartment, the cracked tube light, even the stubborn brown blot of dampness in the corner - all vanished.
He lay on his back under an open sky. But not the sky he knew.
It seemed alive!
Glowing blue pods drifted like jellyfish over a sea of gold and crimson. Green lightning streaks curved between them silently. The clouds glimmered like silk sheets tugged in various directions. It all changed and glimmered, as if the world were breathing.
He jerked upright.
The earth under him wasn't earth at all - it was yielding, like moss, and depressed slightly under his weight. The air was filled with the smell of summer rain and something else - something warm and evocative, like the smell of his grandmother's shawl.
"Where am I?" he grunted to himself, his voice echoing far away, as if spoken underwater.
Then he recalled: the previous evening, he had stood at his kitchen sink, blankly gazing at the teacup in his hand, which was empty. He had been unemployed for nine months. Rent was past due. His phone had not rung in weeks. Even the ones who cared about him had exhausted their words. That crushing numbness had driven him to the pills on his shelf - the ones for anxiety. He hadn't intended to take so many. Or perhaps he had.
Had he died?
A warm glow glowed in the distance.
Driven by impulse rather than logic, he started walking towards it.
The sky trailed behind him - its colour shifting with every pace. The weird glowing pods hovered nearer now, as though wondering. Crystal trees grew around him from the ground. Birds – if those were really birds - flew noiselessly overhead, their wings creating fleeting bits of memory in the air.
He remembered himself as a boy, laughing on a swing. His mother reading him stories in the dim light of a candle. The first girl he ever kissed. The last time he held his father's hand.
The memories flashed and disappeared.
The light expanded, brightened, warmed. He soon came upon its source - a clearing with a mighty tree in the centre of it. Its bark glimmered like molten silver. Its leaves buzzed, not with noise, but with remembrance. Under it stood a woman. Or something resembling a woman.
She had the posture of a monk and the presence of a storm.
“Welcome,” she said, her voice not in the air, but in his mind. “You’ve arrived at the in-between.”
“In-between?” he asked, suddenly aware of the ache in his bones, the heaviness behind his eyes. “Between what?”
“Between despair and choice,” she said gently. “Between breaking and becoming.”
He shook his head. “I think I’m dead.”
“You're not," she told him. "You're lost. But you don't have to remain that way."
He wished to laugh. "You don't get it. I destroyed everything. I don't have a future. I don't even have hope."
The woman moved closer and held out her hand. In the centre of her palm was a small sphere of light, like a firefly trapped in amber.
This is the final fragment of your hope," she told him. "It never left you. It had just been buried under the noise. This centre exists in the space between your pain and your potential. You came here not to die - but to choose."
"Choose what?"
"To live. To enjoy life. To start over."
He gazed at the orb. It glowed slowly, in time with his breathing.
Memories rushed back in - moments of laughter, moments of kindness, forgotten dreams. A classroom where he once taught. A letter from an old student. A poem he had written but never shared. The dog he once rescued. A painting he never finished.
His eyes welled with tears. “But I’ve lost so much time.”
She smiled. "Time is water. It flows. It cleanses. And it always keeps moving forward. The only thing it waits for is you."
He grasped the orb.
The world shook.
Light burst around him, not blinding but warm, like a sunrise on a cold morning. The tree started to break apart into golden dust. The sky above erupted into a thousand soft stars.
And then - the quiet was filled with a new type of noise.
The chirping of birds.
A whistling kettle.
Laughter in the distance.
And the gentle buzz of a fan whirring overhead.
He gasped and sat up.
He was home. In his room. The ceiling was cracked, the fan was rusty, the mixer-grinder was whining from the next room.
But something was different.
He got up, went to the window and opened it.
The sun streamed in like a new hope.
He could feel the light on his skin. The world was still broken, still loud, still flawed.
But now, so was he. And that was fine.
He grabbed his phone.
There were no new texts.
He opened the notes app and started writing.
"Day One. I am still here. I start again."
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