She had just begun to tell herself that she had imagined the entire thing - that she wasn’t feeling this strange and inexorable pull towards something she could not name; that she was not suffocating under the choking feeling of something inside of her perched in her lungs and trying to escape with every exhale.

She was–exhausted? Sick? She had overstrained her imagination in a place where the mundane was already more fantastical than she wanted to consider. That was all.

A voice twinged somewhere within her reproachfully: you’re running, it accused her. To which her only retort was: so what? But she knew the answer already - that she’d never been much for running, and whatever it was she was sprinting away from was catching up.

She had come to fear sleeping, almost immediately. She had a terror of what might come to her in dreams that she could not avoid. She put herself into bed amid the sound of podcasts, desperate for the voices of strangers to pull her thoughts away from the memory of closing her hands around a red ribbon in the snow and becoming, before her foot even hit the ground, a different person. Just like you wanted, the wretched little voice inside her taunted.

She woke up at first to an oppressive silence. But it was broken by a thin, distant sound. Carolers? Disgusting, she thought, before she squinted blearily at her phone and realized that this was a terribly strange time for caroling.

She lay paralyzed in irrational fear, unwilling to rise and go to the window; unable to cover her ears out of a nervousness that she might miss some cue to flee. Petitcru slept soundly in the little bed beside her own, unmoved, as the voices seemed to grow louder.

Under other circumstances, in a different place and with different concerns, she might have been arrested by the sound of melancholy, layered voices that seemed to evoke hallways of stone under faraway skies. She found herself instinctively trying to parse the chanting words: Welsh? Gaelic? But they were too strange to her. Perhaps, she thought, she was even now asleep. The thought was a comforting one, and she relaxed slightly under the influence of the idea that she would have forgotten this in the morning.

But she did not. Long after the voices faded the sky grew grey with approaching sunrise, and she lay still awake in her bed, shivering even though she wasn’t cold, lingering on her strangely perfect recall of the singing. She could shape her lips around the syllables if she wanted, she thought - could feel each word forming itself, perhaps borne on the air of that thing in her lungs that she had been running from, and tormenting her with a meaning she seemed to have just forgotten.

By the time she had finally drifted off again, she felt, as she succumbed to sleep, the sensation of all that knowledge slipping further away from her. She let it go with relief, with no desire to continue to scrabble for things that she could not understand. She embraced her ignorance and looked the other way from what she did not want to see, and only in the pang of loss when she awakened did she feel the uncomfortable suggestion of the idea that she would find out one day, whether she wanted to or not, whether she had truly dreamed the music.