Chapter 6: The Basement Door
The thing about people like Norah is that their brain does not shut up, even when they are asleep. This means her dreams were not dreams, really, but more like theatre plays put together by a half-drunk director with unresolved childhood issues.
The weirdest thing happened that night after meeting Joshua, because for the first time her dream did not involve falling off a cliff, or arguing with a god she did not believe in, or getting chased by a giant toothpaste tube that kept yelling “believe, believe, believe.”
Instead, she dreamed about a door, a plain, grey basement door in the middle of a sunny meadow. She did not know what was behind it, but she knew she had seen it before, not in a dream, but in real life, only she did not know where. It was the kind of dream that did not scare you but sat inside your brain all day, like a song you did not remember liking.
That morning, on her way to school, Norah kept thinking about that door. She had this itch under her skin, like something was about to happen, or maybe had already happened and she just had not noticed yet.
The world felt sharper that day, as if the sky was a little too blue and the crows a little too loud. Even the potholes on the road looked suspiciously intentional, as if someone had drawn them on purpose. She kept replaying Joshua’s voice in her head, trying to remember exactly how he smiled, like he was not surprised that she existed, like he had always known she was out there, waiting for someone not to call her crazy.
At school, they had a lecture on civics and the teacher was explaining the constitution as if it were a bedtime story. Norah whispered to Joshua, “How come nobody questions why we follow rules written by dead men?” and he whispered back, “Maybe because we are scared of writing our own.”
They both chuckled and got detention for talking, but honestly, Norah did not care. She actually liked detention because it was quiet, and nobody expected you to be productive in there. You could just exist, like an unplugged lamp, and sometimes existing without performance was the most peaceful thing in the world.
That day, after school, she took a different road home. It was not on purpose, just one of those things where your feet forget the plan and start walking wherever they want, as if they are being pulled by something invisible.
She passed this old abandoned building she must have walked past a hundred times before but never really looked at, and suddenly she froze. Painted on one of the cracked walls was a grey door, not a real door, but a mural, and it looked exactly like the one in her dream.
Her stomach dropped so hard it felt like an elevator cable had snapped inside her, and she could not tell if it was coincidence, or some glitch in her brain, or something worse.
She took a photo of the wall, but when she looked at her phone later, the door was not in the picture. The mural was just a blank patch of concrete. She thought, “Okay, maybe I am losing it finally. Maybe I have crossed some invisible mental checkpoint where now I start seeing things.”
At the same time, it did not feel like a breakdown. It felt like a breadcrumb trail, as if someone or something wanted her to notice. She could not decide if she was scared or curious or just deeply, deeply tired of pretending this world was as boring as people said it was.
She did not tell Joshua, not yet. Partly because she did not know how to explain it, and partly because something told her this was not ready to be shared. It had to grow a little more inside her before it came out.
That night, she did not sleep much. She just lay there with her eyes wide open, thinking about the door and the dream, and the blank photo, and the way the world had started looking back at her as if it was done being the stage and wanted to be a character too.
The scary part, the really scary part, was how much she liked it.
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