One morning, she woke up and couldn’t tell which faucet was real. She reached for the headset out of habit, then stopped. The bagpipes started next door. The coffee was bitter. The rejection email was still in her trash folder.
She brought the rock down.
The last thing the headset displayed, unprompted, was a memory she hadn’t chosen: her seven-year-old self, drawing a stick-figure family on a wall. The caption read: “Home wasn’t perfect. But it was real.” home2reality