Where the moon waits for me

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Where the Moon Waits for Me

Subtitle: She Waited Where Time Stood Still


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I only dream in silver now. Not gray, not dull—silver. Like starlight dipped in memory. It began six weeks ago, after the accident.

They said I was lucky. The car flipped twice, landed upside down. The other driver didn’t survive. But I walked away. Bruised ribs, fractured wrist. Nothing permanent, at least on the outside.

But I didn’t feel lucky. I felt... misaligned. Like my shadow no longer fit.

The first night home from the hospital, I dreamt of her.

She stood barefoot on the edge of a silent lake beneath a sky soaked in stars. The moon was enormous, low, glowing like a guardian. Its light made the water shimmer like mercury. And there she was—facing me, but always just a little far away.

I didn’t recognize her.

Yet my heart did.


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She didn’t speak at first. Just smiled. A sad, knowing smile, like someone welcoming a stranger they already love.

Each night, the dream returned. Always the lake. Always the silver light. Always her.

Eventually, she spoke.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”

“No,” I said, ashamed.

“That’s okay. The moon remembers for both of us.”


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Her name was Aria.

She told me this place existed between memory and dream—where time slows, hearts remember, and souls wait.

“For what?” I asked.

“For the ones who forget,” she said.

I laughed, though gently. “This isn’t real.”

She stepped closer. Her eyes caught the moonlight in a way that made me ache.

“You feel that?” she asked, placing a hand over my chest.

I did. Something tight and bright, something buried and blooming all at once.

“That’s real.”


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Back in the waking world, I felt the pull. Every night, I needed to see her again. She was the only thing that made sense. I stopped answering friends. I didn’t return my mother’s calls. Food tasted like paper. The doctors said it was trauma. Depression. Disassociation.

But they didn’t understand. They didn’t know her.

Each night I dreamt deeper.

I remembered her laugh next. Then her voice when she cried. And one night, I remembered the song—the one we sang under the stars when we were seventeen, lying on the hood of my car in the middle of nowhere.

“Aria,” I whispered in the dream. “You were real.”

She smiled. Her eyes glistened.

“You’re starting to come back.”


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I asked her what happened to us. Why I’d forgotten. Why she was here, in this strange world of silver light and still water.

“You left,” she said, softly.

“Why?”

“You had to.”

And that was all she said for the rest of the night.


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In the real world, I began slipping.

I found myself writing her name in the margins of my notebooks. Humming that song. I visited the old overlook where we used to go. Where we said we'd run away together after graduation.

But we didn’t.

Because she died.

It came back in pieces. Her scream. The headlights. The rain. My hands slipping on the wheel.

We were eighteen.

I had survived the crash. She hadn’t.

And now… she was waiting.


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That night, the dream changed.

The lake was gone. The moon was closer. So close I could see veins of light threading across its surface. The sky pulsed like breath. Aria stood at a door made of starlight.

“You remember,” she said.

I nodded.

“Then why are you still here?”

I didn’t have an answer.

“Luca…” Her voice trembled. “I waited because I thought maybe... maybe you’d come home.”

“I’m not dead.”

“No,” she said. “But you’re not fully alive either.”


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I stood before her, aching to touch her, to stay. I could feel the weight of the world pulling me back, like an undertow.

“I want to stay,” I whispered.

“I know,” she said. “But if you do, you don’t come back.”

Behind her, the moon shimmered like a tear about to fall.

“Is it peaceful?” I asked.

“It’s not peace, Luca,” she said. “It’s stillness.”

She placed a hand on my heart again.

“Go live. For both of us.”


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I woke up crying. For the first time in years, I let myself grieve. I told my mother everything. I visited Aria’s grave for the first time since the funeral. I began therapy. I started running. Writing. Breathing.

But every now and then, I still dream of silver.

And when I do, I see her standing at the lake’s edge, the moon glowing behind her, waiting.

She never calls me forward anymore.

She just smiles.

And I smile back.

Because I know: when it’s truly time, she’ll still be there—

—where the moon waits for me.


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~ The End ~