The first thing I noticed was that I slept. For forty-five years I had dreamed every night in high definition — vivid, violent, exhausting dreams I was always half-aware were dreams, the part of me that never stopped scanning for threat carrying on through the night with invented material. I woke most mornings with my heart racing, having spent the dark hours standing between some danger and the people I loved. I assumed that was simply how sleep worked.
The night the picture changed, it stopped. Not gradually. That night I slept the way I imagine people are supposed to — completely, without the night shift running — and woke up feeling like a different person. The nightmares have not come back since.
It took me a while to understand what had happened. The dreams had been an alarm. Forty-five years of something-is-wrong-and-has-no-name, processed every night because the daylight hours wouldn’t allow it. The moment the thing finally had a name, the alarm switched off.
Other things came online after that, more slowly.
A fog I hadn’t known I was living inside lifted — I only recognised it by its absence, the way you notice a sound only once it stops. A steadiness arrived that I couldn’t account for. And then, one evening, walking home through a busy street in Seoul, something I can only describe as a tunnel opened. For most of my life I had moved through the world the way you move through a town in a car at night — insulated, efficient, the outside processed as data rather than felt. That evening I just received it. The temperature of the air. The light. The noise from open doorways. The pavement under my feet. The complete indifference of a crowd that owed me nothing.
I stood in the middle of it and felt the night happening around me.
People talk about transition as though the first effects are all physical. The ones that floored me weren’t. They were these — sleep, and quiet, and a street at night arriving in full for the first time at fifty-two.
All my senses, finally, online.
