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I close my eyes and the library arrives without being summoned—its shelves rise like geological strata, layered in languages I have never studied yet somehow understand. A brass sextant floats beside me, ticking at the pace of my pulse, each tick planting another star on the vaulted ceiling until the constellations spell unfinished sentences from my childhood diary.

At the center stands a spiral staircase hewn from a single redwood, its rings marking centuries that are also minutes. I climb, barefoot, and on every third step I age backward: thirty-two becomes twelve, becomes newborn curiosity. The banister warms to my touch like a living wrist; it is the arm of every teacher who ever let me linger after class to ask one more impossible question.

Halfway up, I meet the child I almost was. She wears dungarees patched with nebulae and holds a prism to her eye, splitting sunlight into seven possible futures. Together we slide it along the bannister, scattering rainbow bridges across the void below. Each hue is a decision I postponed: the violet of an unplayed violin, the green of a garden never planted, the indigo of a letter left unsent. They flutter like origami fireflies waiting for the breath that will unfold them into real wings.

The staircase dissolves at the top into an attic door that opens onto the roof of the world. Here the wind speaks in half-remembered lullabies my mother hummed while folding laundry. On the parapet sits an hourglass whose sand runs upward, grain by grain returning to the bulb of origin. I invert it; the sand obeys its own law and continues ascending, carrying flakes of my forgotten dreams like seed crystals. One lodges behind my eyelid—not as irritation, but as a tiny lens. Through it I can see the library below refolding itself into the shape of my beating heart, each book a ventricle, each star a spark of still-unvoiced wonder.

I sit, legs dangling over the planet’s edge. The child leans her head on my shoulder; her hair smells of rain on warm pavement. Together we watch the sextant drift past, now a compass, now a pocket watch, now a silver locket holding the sound of my father’s laugh the day he taught me to ride a bicycle. The sky is not dark but velvet-deep, the color of closed eyelids at dawn. Somewhere inside it, the library is reorganizing itself by weight of longing rather than alphabet.

I understand then that this reverie is not escape but return. Every unlived life hums like a beehive in the walls. When I wake, I’ll taste honey on my tongue and know it was gathered from the moments I paused to wonder, still possible, still waiting in the combs of maybe.

The child and I turn the hourglass one last time. The sand, still rising, carries us toward morning.