Levi resurfaced in the world of colours. Resurfaced, thought Levi, that is exactly the word. While he’d previously had the sensation of treading solid ground, he now felt buoyant. He was chest-deep in a sea of translucent turquoise. Fine strings of every colour imaginable threaded their way from the unseen depths of that turquoise expanse. Emerging above the surface they lingered for but the blink of an eye before they evaporated, claiming their place among the multitudinous hues that made up the fine mist that blanketed him.

An unseen force was pushing him upwards. He was already in waist-deep where previously he had been up to his chest in that sea of turquoise. The colours had a much stronger presence than he did and were pushing him out. They were not doing so on purpose, out of malignance or envy or whatever else causes people to push away others, or so Levi thought—rather, it seemed a fact of nature, a given, that these colours should reclaim the volume that he was currently occupying with his non-presence. For that he was, a non-presence, neither given colour nor giving colour. He’d left all of that behind as he’d touched that treacly sickly colour that oozed into existence in the dream before.

As he thought the words he knew them for the lie they were. He’d gone to sleep as a non-presence already. All that gave me colour, all that I gave colour, it ended last night.

He blinked and realised that he was already more emerged than submerged. Paying closer attention to the mist that was swirling around him, he saw that the coloured strings that he’d seen evaporate moments before had coalesced mere yards above the sea that bore them. In defiance of the quiescent strands of colour that they’d been moments earlier—almost as an adolescent shaking off his childhood—these reborn colours behaved erratically, wildly, unruly.

His knees broke the surface. What he’d taken for a thick blanket of mist already seemed to thin as more and more of his body was delivered to the frigid air above the ocean—for that it was, he now realised, frigid. But the coldness was not a coldness outside of him. The colours around him were in overdrive, twisting and spinning and swirling. They should’ve warmed him, comforted him. But they didn’t. Adolescence had turned into life’s rush hour—eddies going faster and faster to outrun their brethren at chance for more and more and more. As his toes breached the surface his breath caught.

The yelling. Her telling him he was a good-for-nothing screwup. A misfit. Woefully unsuited to the fast-paced life she’d so effortlessly rolled into. The drinking. The partying. The sports. The seventy-hour working weeks. And in the end, the door. The dreaded door. The door that slammed shut a thousand times before it slammed shut once more. Then never again.

The colours thinned, evaporated and then disappeared. Levi woke up on the couch. He had to face that a truth. A treacly sickly oozing truth. A truth so large it left no room for Levi.

She’d left him.