He was the one who arrived without warning — not in a dream, but in that thin, trembling space right before the dream breaks open. I remember the night he first appeared: I hadn’t slept for what felt like days, and the world around me had begun to soften, blur, and bloom in impossible colors.

I wasn’t trying to summon him. I was just trying to breathe. But out of the static of my mind — out of that exhausted hum where thoughts turn into fragments — he stepped forward, wearing flowers that didn’t exist anywhere except the place my insomnia carved open.

He felt like an echo of someone I used to be, and someone I never became. A guardian of my drifting hours, a witness to the way I broke and rearranged myself in the dark. He held himself with both elegance and fatigue, as if he too knew the cost of being awake for too long, as if he bloomed only because he refused to wilt.

He wasn’t a muse. He wasn’t a dream. He was a mirror grown out of flowers — a reminder that even in the most sleepless nights, beauty will find a way to inhabit the cracks.