I.

Every morning, Nara woke up before her alarm rang.

And every morning, without fail, her mother would pass by her door and mutter, "You’ll be late again."

It didn’t matter that she was early. It didn’t matter that Nara hadn’t overslept in weeks. The phrase came like clockwork, as though someone hit play on a recording. The exact intonation. The same tired shuffle of footsteps fading away.

She stopped replying. She just listened. She watched. She noted.

In class, her seatmate Mia would ask, "Did you do the homework?" at precisely 7:52 a.m. Whether it was raining, sunny, or exams week, the question came.

Nara started answering differently. Saying absurd things like, "I baked it into a pie," or "I mailed it to Mars." But Mia never reacted.

Just a beat of silence. Then: "Haha, you’re so weird, Nara."

Every time.

It began to gnaw at her—this feeling of repetition, of things running on a loop, as if the world was stitched together by threads too tight to unravel.

Then one day, the thread snapped.

A new student walked into class. That wasn’t unusual. Transfers happened. But this one—Iven—made her skin buzz before he even spoke. His presence felt wrong. Off-script.

He didn’t wait for the teacher’s introduction. He walked straight to her, eyes locked like magnets. He sat in the empty chair beside her—the one no one ever sat in.

"You’ve been watching everything," he said quietly, almost bored. "But you missed something."

Nara stared. "Excuse me?"

He leaned closer. "You forgot to ask: what happens when a thought starts thinking back?"

She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Something tightened in her chest like a string being pulled too far.

She wrote about him that night.

> Iven. Transfer student. Said strange things. Couldn’t predict his words.

She closed the notebook. In the morning, the ink was gone. Not smeared. Not erased. Just gone. As if she never wrote it.

Mia asked about the homework at 7:52 a.m. again. Nara said nothing. And Mia didn’t respond. Just stared forward, smiling like a wind-up doll.

Trees outside swayed in perfect rhythm. The same two birds chirped, looped, chirped again.

Something cracked inside her. Nara didn’t go home after school.

She walked.

Past the bakery with the identical pastries.

Past the man who always dropped his coin at the same spot near the fountain.

Past the dog that barked once, then sat and stared, unblinking.

It all ticked like clockwork.

Except her.

And Iven.

She found him at the edge of town, where the sidewalk broke into grass and silence. He stood there like he’d been waiting since before she was born.

“You noticed,” he said.

“No one changes,” she whispered. “Not even the wind.”

“That’s because it isn’t wind. It’s a thought, mimicking motion.”

She hesitated. “Whose thought?”

He turned. For the first time, his eyes weren’t just watching—they were pleading.

“That’s the question, Nara. Whose dream is this? Yours—or mine?”

The sky flickered.

Like a dying bulb.

Nara reached out to touch his sleeve, but her fingers passed through him like smoke. He didn’t flinch. Just whispered: “Be careful. The more you remember, the less real you become to them.”

Behind her, the town exhaled in one long, mechanical sigh.

And Nara finally asked herself—

What if I’m the only one who’s not real?

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