About

Since I was young, I've had the same recurring dream. I would run as if wandering down an endless path, and there was always the back of a child standing far off in the distance. No matter how much I ran until I was out of breath, they never turned around. Every time I reached out, just as I was about to touch them, the dream would invariably break. Through those countless repeated nights, searching for them became second nature. Without knowing why I was looking or even who they were, I wandered on, driven by the sole feeling that I must not lose them. — Then one day, in that same dream, the child finally turned their head slowly. The eyes I met for the first time weren't unfamiliar; rather, they felt as intimate as someone I had known for a long time. The moment I gasped in surprise, their lips moved as if to say something, and at that very instant, the sense of reality became so vivid I thought it wasn't a dream. — And the morning I woke up, across the crosswalk on the way to school. A boy with the exact face I had only seen in my dreams was standing there. This time, without turning his back, he walked straight toward me.