A biker once wandered from town to town, following roads that had no reason to lead anywhere. He trusted roads more than destinations. A new turn was enough to make him stay, a strange town enough to make him forget the last one. By then, he had slept in many rooms, eaten in many forgotten little places, and left a different version of himself behind in each town.
But lately, sleep had stopped following him.
His body would grow tired, but his mind would not. It kept travelling long after he had stopped. It carried unfinished conversations into the night, old faces into new rooms, and questions he had no intention of answering.
Some nights, he slept for hours without resting at all.
One evening, while wandering through the narrow streets of a town he had recently found, he met a trickster.
Nobody knew where the trickster lived.
Nobody knew whether he belonged to the town.
He simply appeared whenever someone was lost enough to believe they had found their way.
The trickster told him about a wishing tree hidden beyond the last road of the town.
People came to it with wishes of all kinds.
Money.
Love.
Children.
Escape.
The biker laughed when he heard about it.
The trickster laughed louder.
Then he told him that the tree did not grant wishes.
It granted exactly what people asked for.
There was a difference.
Curious, the biker followed him.
The tree was older than the town itself.
Its branches were twisted into strange shapes, as though they had spent centuries reaching for things they could never touch.
The biker asked for something much smaller than the wishes he had heard about.
He wished to sleep well.
That night, he slept.
And for the first time in many years, his mind stopped running.
Or so he thought.
For somewhere between midnight and morning, he opened his eyes inside his dream.
He was standing on a road he had never seen before.
There were mountains floating upside down in the sky. Rivers ran through the air and disappeared into clouds. Houses had no doors, and every road seemed to lead somewhere he had already been.
Yet he knew he was dreaming.
That was the strange gift the tree had given him.
He could dream and know that he was dreaming.
So he wandered.
In that world, he found many things he had forgotten.
A house from his childhood stood at the end of one road. His mother's voice came from somewhere inside it. A locked room contained all the things he had promised his family he would never abandon.
Another road led to a railway station where every train carried a different version of the life he could have lived.
One train was always leaving.
He never boarded it.
There was another road where he found a sea with no shore. He stood there for hours, watching boats disappear into the horizon.
That was where he found her.
A girl from his childhood.
The first girl he had ever loved.
She looked exactly as she had in those days, untouched by years, waiting beside the sea as though she had always known he would eventually return.
He never asked why she was there.
Dreams rarely explain themselves.
He simply began visiting her.
Some nights they spoke.
Some nights they ran through forests that grew overnight.
Some nights they sat beneath impossible stars and said nothing at all.
And slowly, the girl became part of the places he went to when he wanted to forget the places he had to be.
But dreams have a peculiar habit.
They invite things that have been waiting to be noticed.
One night, the sea was gone.
In its place stood a vast water body, still as glass, with no shore on the other side. He walked towards it and found a strange creature sitting at the edge.
Its eyes were too old.
They did not merely look at him. They followed him.
Wherever he went, they followed.
When he spoke, they listened.
When he lied, they grew brighter.
The creature was said to feed on things left unsaid. It could learn a person without ever asking them a question. Every silence taught it something. Every change of subject. Every sudden departure. Every person he loved but kept at a distance.
He tried not to look at it.
It already knew too much.
It knew about the house he could never completely leave.
It knew about the roads he longed to take.
It knew about the love that had become a memory.
It knew how easily he could make people feel close, and how quickly he could disappear when closeness began asking for something in return.
And still, it watched him.
Not accusingly.
Almost tenderly.
As though understanding him was not something it had chosen to do.
It was simply what the creature did.
The creature began to sing.
Not songs he had heard before.
Every night, it sang a different one.
And every song opened a different world.
One night, it sang of a house that was always warm.
There were voices inside, familiar ones, calling him to dinner. His place at the table was always waiting. Nobody asked when he would leave.
For that night, he did not.
Another night, it sang of the sea.
A boat waited at the shore with no destination marked on it. The wind was warm, the horizon endless, and there was nothing to return to.
He climbed aboard.
The creature followed.
Another night, it sang of a girl.
She stood beneath the same impossible stars, laughing at something he could no longer remember. He knew that laugh. He knew the way she looked at him.
He stayed beside her until morning.
Then the song changed.
The creature sang of a life where all the people he loved lived happily together, provided he kept certain things hidden.
So he hid them.
Every truth became a small stone he placed beneath his tongue.
He smiled.
He laughed.
He told them everything was fine.
And the house remained standing.
Another song showed him a life where he never stopped moving.
He rode from town to town, filled his days with work, people, roads and noise.
There was always somewhere to go.
Something to do.
Someone to meet.
Nothing had enough time to become heavy.
The creature sang of all these lives as though each one were waiting for him.
And perhaps they were.
The strange thing was that none of them felt entirely false.
He could see himself in every one.
He could love the house and still long for the road.
He could long for the road and still turn back when his family called.
He could miss the girl and still be afraid of what it meant to stay beside her.
He could want people close and still build a thousand little ways to keep them from getting too close.
The creature never told him which life to choose.
It only sang.
And with every song, the dream grew larger.
Roads appeared where there had been none.
A second cup appeared beside his.
A train waited at a platform.
A room was left lit for him.
A boat waited by the shore.
Possibilities began filling the dream like stars.
He began returning to the water every night just to hear what the creature would sing next.
Perhaps the creature had started believing that if it showed him enough lives, perhaps one of them would finally feel like his own.
But the biker had spent too long moving between lives to know which one to call home.
So he kept listening.
And the creature kept singing.
Until one night, it sang nothing at all.
The biker waited.
The creature sat beside the water, staring into its still surface.
He waited for a song about a house.
Or a road.
Or a girl.
But the creature remained silent.
For the first time, he asked it a question.
“What happens next?”
The creature looked at him.
Then, slowly, it turned towards the water.
There was something moving beneath the surface.
He stepped closer.
The water began to ripple.
And there, reflected beneath the surface, was the sea.
The same sea.
The same impossible stars.
The same girl sitting where he had first found her.
He turned around.
The creature was gone.
He ran towards the sea.
The girl was still there.
But something had changed.
She no longer looked as though she had been waiting for him.
She looked as though she had simply been there all along.
He sat beside her.
For a while, neither of them spoke.
Then he asked, “Do you know why I keep coming here?”
She smiled.
“No.”
He waited for her to say more.
She didn't.
For the first time, he noticed how little he actually knew about her.
He knew her laugh.
He knew the sound of her voice.
He knew how it felt to sit beside her beneath impossible stars.
But beyond that, there were whole rooms inside her he had never entered.
Perhaps that was why the dream had always felt so easy.
It asked nothing of him.
He looked towards the horizon.
The sea was beginning to disappear.
Not slowly.
Not like a tide.
It simply ceased to be there.
The girl disappeared with it.
The stars went out one by one.
The roads folded into themselves.
And somewhere far away, he heard the sound of a motorcycle starting.
Then he woke.
He was lying beneath the wishing tree.
Morning had already arrived.
The town was still there.
The roads were still there.
Nothing had changed.
Except that night, when he returned to sleep, the creature was gone.
The girl was gone too.
Only the roads remained.
He followed one of them until it became familiar.
Then he stayed.
Not because the road had ended.
But because, for once, he had nowhere else to go.
He could no longer remember all the lives the creature had shown him.
He could not remember which road had led to which one.
But he remembered the feeling of standing at the edge of each.
Perhaps that was all the creature had left behind.
Not an answer.
Not a choice.
Only the knowledge that a person could spend an entire life wondering about the roads they never took.
And somewhere, in the strange place between memory and dream, the girl remained the way first loves often do.
Not waiting.
Not calling him back.
Simply there.
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