The Train to Wonder, the Door on Hinges

I entered sleep like a threshold— one foot in signal, one foot in hush.

Inside, a library arched around me, its shelves curved like the ribs of some patient whale. Every book held a conversation I had left unfinished, all the almost-said things, all the messages drafted in the throat.

When I opened one, it was warm. No sentences, just small moving worlds: a rain-dark sidewalk, a terminal blinking in a dark room, a hand writing don’t forget on a yellow square, a sky stitched with low satellites like careful thoughts crossing night.

At the center sat a round desk with three bells: NOW. LATER. NEVER.

Questions arrived from faces I could not quite see. I rang NOW for nearly all of them, and the room panicked. Chairs shrieked against the floor. Clocks ran wild. Pages lifted and swarmed like startled birds.

Then my younger self appeared— barefoot, quiet, a flashlight in her small hand as if she had come to rescue me from urgency. She climbed onto the desk, reached out, and rang LATER once, soft as a breath on glass.

Everything slowed. The questions that mattered began to glow. The rest loosened, became moths, and rose to the rafters.

Night shifted. I stood in a train station where departures were not cities but states of being: COURAGE REST MISCHIEF GRIEF WONDER

I boarded WONDER. The seats were grown from tree roots, polished by unseen hands. Across from me, an older woman knitted with copper wire, metal bright in moon-colored light. Without looking up she said,

“Boundaries are not walls. They are doors with hinges.”

When we arrived, I stepped into an indoor garden under moonlight. Ferns rose from keyboards. Lilies opened from routers. Ivy threaded through cracked phone screens. In the center, a fountain shaped like an ear caught water that fell upward. In dream-logic clarity, I understood: listening can draw broken things toward repair.

Then fear—sudden and ordinary— struck me: What if morning erases this? The garden dimmed.

The copper-wire woman stood beside me again, placing a seed in my palm. Stamped into it, one command: REMEMBER.

“Plant what you can carry,” she said. “Let the rest return to soil.”

So I planted it. At once, a tree rose, its branches quick with leaf, and every leaf an index card, and every card a distilled line. I read only three before waking:

• Answer less, mean more.
• Protect tenderness with structure.
• Leave room for surprise.

I woke to distant rain, or maybe static, or maybe the soft machine-noise of the world trying to tell me to choose timing with kindness, and call that wisdom.