At night, emload turns reflective. The ceiling becomes an ocean. Thoughts drift in currents of possibility and dread: the future’s bright glare, the present’s thin reed, the past folding into the corners. Sleep both beckons and flees. Dreams are close cousins to desire — strange, vivid, sometimes mercilessly specific. A teen navigates these waters with the clumsy expertise of someone steering a small boat through fog: steady hands, sudden panics, a stubborn, private joy when shore glimpses appear.