AUDIO PODCAST 31 minutes
When Tom drifts into sleep one ordinary night, he’s pulled into a vivid dream where Sandra—his grounded, quietly magnetic grade‑school companion he hasn’t thought of in forty years—appears exactly as she was in high school. She shows him three lives they might have lived together, each one tender, unsettling, and impossibly real. Shaken awake, Tom searches for her… only to discover she died three days earlier. What follows is a decades‑long reflection on connection, timing, and the mysteries that refuse to fade. Three Days After Sandra is a haunting, heartfelt novella about the questions we never knew we asked, the lives we never lived, and the quiet ways the past sometimes reaches forward—not to change our path, but to remind us that it mattered.
Tom didn’t go to bed expecting anything unusual. It was just another quiet night in early winter, the kind where the house felt too still and the clock seemed to tick louder than usual. He brushed his teeth, turned off the hallway light, and let the darkness settle around him like a blanket he wasn’t sure he wanted.
He lay there for a while, staring at the faint glow of the streetlamp leaking through the blinds. His mind wandered the way it sometimes did when the day had been unremarkable — drifting to old memories, old faces, old versions of himself. And for reasons he couldn’t explain, a name floated up from the deep end of his mind.
Sandra.
He hadn’t thought about her in years. Not really. Not in the way that mattered. But suddenly he could see her as clearly as if she’d just walked out of the room: the girl who was always grounded, always steady, always more real than the chaos around her. The one he’d done everything with in grade school — projects, recess games, walking home, talking about nothing and everything. They’d had that quiet kind of attraction that kids don’t have words for yet, the kind that just makes two people orbit each other naturally.
He smiled at the memory without meaning to. Then he closed his eyes.
And the moment he did, the world shifted.
He wasn’t in his bedroom anymore. He was standing in a hallway that made no logical sense — part grade school, part high school, part something else entirely. The lockers were the wrong color, the floor tiles mismatched, the air humming with that strange dream‑logic familiarity.
Then he heard footsteps.
Soft ones. Confident ones. Ones he somehow recognized before he even turned around.
“Tom,” a voice said behind him — warm, steady, unmistakably hers.
He turned.
Sandra stood there, exactly as she had been at twelve and seventeen and some impossible age in between. Down‑to‑earth as ever, but glowing with a kind of presence that made the dream feel more real than waking life.
She smiled, and it hit him like a memory he’d forgotten he missed.
“Tom,” she said again, stepping closer. “If we would have ended up together… our lives would have been totally different.”
Sandra didn’t rush him. She never had. Even in childhood, she had that grounded way of standing — like she was planted, like she belonged wherever she was. And here, in this impossible hallway stitched together from two different schools and a memory he didn’t know he still had, she looked exactly as she did at seventeen.
Same hair.
Same eyes.
Same calm.
It was that calm that shook him the most.
“Come on,” she said softly. “Let me show you something.”
She turned, and the hallway stretched out in front of them, shifting as they walked — lockers dissolving into doorways, doorways into open fields, fields into a small apartment he didn’t recognize but somehow knew belonged to them.
He felt a strange pressure in his chest.
A life he never lived, but one that felt… possible.
Sandra walked ahead of him, touching the back of a chair, a stack of books, a framed photo of two people who looked like them but older, settled, familiar. Tom stared at the picture. He didn’t look like himself — not the version he’d become. This Tom looked freer. Softer. Less burdened by expectations he’d carried for so long he’d forgotten they were there.
“This is one way it could have gone,” she said.
He swallowed. “We never even dated.”
“I know.” She smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “You pulled away.”
He felt heat rise in his face — embarrassment, regret, something deeper. “I had to. My family… my church… they had ideas about who I was supposed to end up with.”
“I know,” she repeated, and this time her voice held no judgment. Just understanding. “But that doesn’t mean the connection wasn’t real.”
He looked around the apartment again. The life was simple, ordinary, but it had a warmth that made his throat tighten. He didn’t know if it was longing or grief.
“Why are you showing me this?” he asked.
Sandra stepped closer. She smelled like she did in high school — something clean, something familiar, something that shouldn’t have survived forty years of forgetting.
“Because you wondered,” she said. “Even if you never said it out loud.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but the words died. Because she was right. He had wondered. Not often, not obsessively, but in those quiet moments when life felt like a series of choices made for him rather than by him.
Sandra reached out and touched his hand — warm, real, impossibly real.
And then the apartment flickered.
The walls dissolved into the hallway again. The lockers hummed. The lights buzzed overhead.
Sandra looked at him with an expression he couldn’t read.
“There’s more,” she said. “If you want to see it.”
Tom hesitated. Something in her tone — something gentle but urgent — made his stomach twist.
“Why now?” he asked. “Why after all these years?”
Sandra’s eyes softened. “Because time doesn’t work the way you think it does.”
Before he could ask what she meant, the hallway shifted again, pulling them into another life, another possibility.
And for the first time, Tom felt a flicker of fear.
Not of her.
But of what he might learn.
The hallway shifted again, but this time the change felt heavier, like the air thickened before the world rearranged itself. Tom blinked, and suddenly he was standing in a small kitchen — not the warm, lived‑in apartment from before, but a place that felt sharper, colder, more adult.
Sandra stood by the window, looking out at a street he didn’t recognize. She was still seventeen, impossibly unchanged, but the world around her wasn’t. The contrast made his stomach twist.
“What is this?” Tom asked.
She didn’t turn around. “Another way things could have gone.”
He stepped closer. The kitchen was neat, almost too neat. A single mug on the counter. A calendar with no plans written on it. A silence that felt like it had been there for years.
“This doesn’t look like a happy life,” he said quietly.
Sandra finally turned. “Not every path is.”
He felt something tighten in his chest. “Did we… stay together in this one?”
“For a while,” she said. “Long enough to try. Long enough to learn that love isn’t always enough to overcome everything else.”
He didn’t need her to explain. He knew exactly what “everything else” meant — the expectations, the rules, the invisible lines drawn by family and religion. The pressure he’d felt even as a teenager, the pressure that had made him pull away from her in real life.
In this version, he hadn’t pulled away soon enough.
Sandra walked past him and touched the back of a chair. “You tried to make everyone happy,” she said. “But you couldn’t. And it wore you down.”
Tom swallowed hard. He could see it — a version of himself trying to balance two worlds, failing at both, losing pieces of himself in the process.
“And you?” he asked. “Were you unhappy too?”
Sandra hesitated, and that hesitation hurt more than any answer.
“I didn’t want you to change for me,” she said. “But I also didn’t want to be the reason you felt torn apart.”
He felt a wave of guilt, irrational but overwhelming. “I never wanted to hurt you.”
“I know,” she said softly. “You never did. Not really. But sometimes the things we don’t choose still leave marks.”
The room flickered again — a brief, disorienting pulse of light — and for a moment Tom thought he saw something else behind her. Not another life, not another room, but something like a shadow of time itself. A sense of distance. A sense of loss.
He blinked, and it was gone.
Sandra stepped closer, her expression unreadable. “There’s one more,” she said. “One more life you need to see.”
Tom felt a chill run through him. “Why do I need to see it?”
She looked at him with an intensity that made the dream feel too real, too sharp.
“Because it’s the one that explains why I’m here.”
His breath caught. “Sandra… what does that mean?”
But she didn’t answer.
The kitchen dissolved around them, the walls peeling away like paper in a strong wind. The hallway returned for a heartbeat — lockers humming, lights buzzing — and then even that vanished.
Tom felt himself falling forward into the next possibility, the next truth, the next unanswered question.
And Sandra’s voice followed him, soft and distant:
“Just remember… not everything ends when you think it does.”
Tom landed on solid ground, but the world around him was dimmer than before — not dark, just muted, like everything had been washed in twilight. He stood in a small park he didn’t recognize. The trees were taller than they should’ve been, the sky too still, the air too quiet.
Sandra stood a few steps ahead, her back to him.
This time, she didn’t speak right away.
Tom approached slowly, feeling a heaviness he couldn’t explain. “Where are we?”
Sandra turned, and her expression was different now — softer, sadder, almost… older, even though her face was still seventeen. It was the eyes. They carried something the rest of her didn’t.
“This,” she said quietly, “is the life where we never crossed paths again.”
Tom frowned. “But that’s what actually happened.”
She shook her head. “Not exactly.”
The park shimmered, and suddenly Tom saw flashes — not full scenes, just impressions:
A grocery store aisle.
A crowded graduation ceremony.
A bus stop on a rainy afternoon.
A hospital waiting room.
A street fair.
A library.
A parking lot.
A church foyer.
A crosswalk.
Moments where two people could pass within feet of each other and never know.
“You don’t remember these,” Sandra said, “but they happened. Or they could have. Or they almost did. Time is strange like that.”
Tom felt a chill. “Are you saying we… almost met again?”
Sandra stepped closer. “More than once.”
He swallowed hard. “Why didn’t we?”
She looked down at her hands. “Because you weren’t ready. And I wasn’t either.”
The park flickered again — a brief pulse of light — and suddenly Tom saw a version of himself sitting alone on a bench, older, tired, staring at nothing. Sandra watched him from a distance, her expression unreadable.
“Why didn’t you go to him?” Tom whispered.
Sandra’s voice was barely audible. “Because I didn’t know if he wanted to see me.”
The scene dissolved, leaving only the two of them in the twilight park.
Tom felt something tighten in his chest — grief, regret, longing, confusion, all tangled together. “Sandra… why are you showing me this now?”
She looked up at him, and for the first time since the dream began, he saw something like fear in her eyes.
“Because this is the life closest to the truth,” she said. “The one where we lived our separate stories. The one where we didn’t get answers. The one where things were left unfinished.”
Tom’s breath caught. “Unfinished?”
Sandra nodded. “Some connections don’t end just because the world says they should. Some stay open. Waiting.”
He felt the ground shift beneath him — not physically, but in that deep, internal way where understanding begins to form but refuses to fully reveal itself.
“Sandra,” he said softly, “what happened to you?”
She closed her eyes.
And for a moment — just a moment — she didn’t look like a dream version of herself. She looked like someone carrying the weight of a life lived, a life ended, a life remembered by someone who hadn’t thought of her in forty years until the night she appeared.
When she opened her eyes again, they were bright with something he couldn’t name.
“Tom,” she whispered, “I didn’t come to answer your questions.”
He felt his heart drop. “Then why?”
She stepped closer, so close he could feel the warmth of her presence.
“I came because you asked one without knowing you asked it.”
The world around them began to fade — the trees dissolving, the sky dimming, the ground slipping away like sand.
Tom reached out instinctively, but Sandra only smiled — a sad, knowing smile.
“Not everything ends when you think it does,” she said again, her voice echoing as the dream unraveled.
And then she was gone.
Tom woke with a gasp.
Not the slow drift into morning, not the groggy confusion of a normal dream fading — this was a jolt, a full‑body shock, as if someone had pulled him up from deep water. His heart hammered against his ribs. His hands were shaking. The room felt too bright, too sharp, too real.
For a moment he didn’t move. He just lay there, staring at the ceiling, trying to breathe through the weight pressing against his chest.
Sandra.
Her name hit him like a physical blow.
He hadn’t thought of her in forty years. Not once. Not in passing. Not in nostalgia. Not in the quiet moments when old memories sometimes drifted up uninvited. She had been sealed away in a part of his life he never revisited — not because she didn’t matter, but because the world he grew up in told him he couldn’t.
So why now?
Why her?
Why a dream so vivid it felt like a memory he’d lived instead of imagined?
He sat up slowly, rubbing his face with trembling hands. The details were still there — the hallway, the apartment, the park, her voice, her eyes, the way she looked exactly seventeen. Dreams weren’t supposed to stay that clear. They weren’t supposed to feel like conversations.
They weren’t supposed to leave you with the sense that something unfinished had just brushed past you.
Tom swung his legs over the side of the bed. His feet touched the floor, grounding him, but the unease didn’t fade. If anything, it deepened.
He whispered her name again, testing it, tasting it, feeling the strange familiarity of it after so many years.
Sandra.
It didn’t feel like remembering.
It felt like being reminded.
He stood, walked to the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee he didn’t really want. His hands were still unsteady. He kept replaying her last words in the dream:
“I came because you asked a question without knowing you asked it.”
What question?
When?
How?
He paced the kitchen, trying to shake the feeling, but it clung to him like static. Finally, almost without thinking, he sat down at his laptop.
He hesitated.
This was ridiculous.
People dream about old classmates all the time.
It didn’t mean anything.
But the thought didn’t convince him. Not even a little.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
He typed her name.
Sandra + hometown.
Sandra + high school.
Sandra + maiden name.
He hit Enter.
The search results loaded slowly, as if the universe itself were reluctant to show him what came next.
And then he saw it.
An obituary.
His breath caught in his throat.
He clicked it with a hand that suddenly felt numb.
There she was — older, smiling, the same eyes he’d seen in the dream but carrying decades he hadn’t witnessed. The obituary was short, simple, the kind written by families who don’t know how to summarize a life in a few paragraphs.
But one line stood out, sharp and cold:
She passed away three days ago.
Tom stared at the screen, unable to move.
Three days.
Three days before the dream.
Three days before she appeared in that impossible hallway.
Three days before she showed him the lives they never lived.
His coffee had gone cold. His hands had stopped shaking, replaced by a stillness that felt worse.
He whispered, barely audible:
“What were you trying to tell me?”
But the room stayed silent.
And for the first time in years — maybe ever — Tom felt the weight of a question that had no answer, a question that would follow him long after the dream faded.
A question that had already waited forty years to be asked.
For the rest of the day, Tom moved through his house like someone walking underwater. Everything felt slowed down, muffled, distant. He kept replaying the dream in his mind, trying to find the seams — the places where it should’ve unraveled, the places where it should’ve revealed itself as nothing more than imagination.
But it didn’t unravel.
If anything, it tightened.
Every detail stayed sharp: the way Sandra stood in the hallway, the warmth of her hand, the sadness in her eyes when she showed him the life where they drifted apart. Dreams weren’t supposed to hold together like that. They weren’t supposed to feel like conversations you could quote.
He sat at the kitchen table long after the sun went down, staring at the obituary on his screen. He read it again and again, as if the words might change, as if the date might shift, as if the universe might offer him some kind of explanation.
Three days.
Three days before the dream.
He whispered the number under his breath, as if saying it aloud might make it less impossible. But it didn’t. It only made the room feel smaller.
He closed the laptop and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. He wasn’t a superstitious man. He didn’t believe in signs or messages or visitations. His life had been shaped by rules, by certainty, by the idea that everything had an explanation if you looked hard enough.
But this… this didn’t fit anywhere.
He stood and walked to the window. Outside, the street was quiet, the world moving on as if nothing unusual had happened. But inside, something had shifted. Something he couldn’t name.
He thought about high school — about the way he’d pulled away from Sandra, not because he wanted to, but because he’d been told he should. He thought about the quiet ache he’d buried so deep he forgot it existed. He thought about the way she looked in the dream, unchanged, unaged, as if time had never touched her.
And he thought about the question she said he’d asked without knowing.
What question?
What longing had he carried all these years without realizing it?
He sat back down, feeling the weight of the silence around him. The dream had cracked something open — not a wound, exactly, but a door. A door he didn’t know how to close.
He whispered her name again, softer this time.
“Sandra.”
It didn’t feel like calling out to the past.
It felt like acknowledging something that had been waiting.
He didn’t sleep well that night. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her standing in that twilight park, her expression full of something he still couldn’t decipher. Not sadness. Not regret. Something else.
Something unfinished.
When morning came, he felt no closer to understanding. If anything, the questions had multiplied. But one thing was clear — the dream wasn’t fading. It wasn’t dissolving the way dreams were supposed to. It was settling in, becoming part of him.
And he knew, even then, that this wasn’t something he would forget in a week or a month or even a year.
Some moments don’t leave.
Some questions don’t answer themselves.
Some connections don’t end just because life moves on.
Tom didn’t know what the dream meant.
He didn’t know why it came when it did.
He didn’t know why Sandra appeared after forty years of silence.
But he knew one thing with absolute certainty:
He would never be the same.
Years passed, and the dream settled into Tom’s life the way certain memories do — not fading, not demanding attention, but living quietly in the background, like a book on a shelf he never opened but never forgot was there.
He built a life he was proud of.
A life he chose.
A life that, despite its twists and imperfections, felt right in a way that didn’t need comparison to anything else.
He didn’t regret the path he walked.
Not for a moment.
He loved the people in his life.
He valued the experiences that shaped him.
He felt gratitude — deep, steady gratitude — for the years he’d lived and the person he’d become.
The dream didn’t change that.
It didn’t make him wish for a different past or a different partner or a different version of himself. It didn’t pull him backward.
If anything, it made him more aware of how precious the life he did live truly was.
But the mystery remained.
Not as a wound.
Not as a longing.
As a question.
A quiet, persistent question that lived in the spaces between moments.
Sometimes, when he was out for a walk or sitting alone on the porch at dusk, he would think about Sandra — not with regret, not with sadness, but with a kind of gentle curiosity. A wondering about the strange intersection of dream and reality, about the timing, about the way she appeared exactly as she had been, untouched by the years.
He would think about the three lives she showed him.
Not as alternatives he wished he’d lived, but as reflections — mirrors held up to the person he once was and the person he became.
He would think about the life where they tried and struggled.
The life where they drifted apart without ever reconnecting.
The life where they built something warm and simple.
And he would think about the life he actually lived — the one that mattered most — the one that shaped him, challenged him, fulfilled him.
The dream didn’t diminish that life.
It illuminated it.
It reminded him that choices have weight, that paths diverge for reasons we don’t always understand, and that sometimes the past returns not to rewrite anything, but to acknowledge what was left unsaid.
One evening, nearly twenty years after the dream, Tom sat outside watching the sky shift from gold to blue. The air was cool, the world quiet. He felt content — deeply, honestly content — in a way that didn’t need explanation.
And yet, as the first stars appeared, he felt that familiar presence again. Not a voice. Not a vision. Just a sense — a soft awareness, like a memory brushing past him.
He didn’t speak aloud.
He didn’t need to.
Some connections don’t end.
Some questions don’t resolve.
Some moments stay with us not because they demand answers, but because they remind us that life is larger, stranger, and more interconnected than we ever realize.
Tom leaned back in his chair, breathing in the cool evening air.
He didn’t regret anything.
He didn’t wish for anything different.
He simply carried the dream the way one carries a story — not to change the past, but to honor the mystery of it.
And somewhere, in a place beyond explanation, he felt that was enough.
Tom never tried to force an explanation.
In the early years, he’d wondered — of course he had. Anyone would. But as time passed, the dream settled into a different place inside him. Not a puzzle to solve. Not a message to decode. Something gentler. Something quieter.
Something that simply was.
He learned to live with the mystery the way one lives with a distant star — aware of it, occasionally drawn to it, but not needing to touch it to appreciate its light.
Every so often, usually in the stillness of late evening, he would think about Sandra. Not with longing. Not with regret. Just with a kind of soft recognition, like remembering a song from childhood that still stirs something unnamed.
He would think about the girl she was — grounded, steady, someone he felt naturally connected to before the world told him who he was supposed to be. He would think about the boy he was — earnest, conflicted, trying to navigate expectations he didn’t yet understand.
And he would think about the man he became — someone who built a life he valued, someone who found meaning and love and purpose in the path he actually walked.
He didn’t wish for a different life.
He didn’t wish for a different partner.
He didn’t wish for a different past.
But he did sometimes wish he understood why the dream had come when it did.
Not to change anything.
Just to know.
He would sit with that thought for a while, letting it rise and fall like a tide. And then, almost always, he would feel a quiet acceptance settle in — the understanding that some experiences aren’t meant to be explained. They’re meant to be carried.
One evening, years after the dream, Tom found himself flipping through an old yearbook. He hadn’t opened it in decades. The pages smelled faintly of dust and time. He turned them slowly, not searching for anything in particular.
And then he saw her.
Sandra.
Seventeen.
Smiling in a way that felt both familiar and impossibly distant.
He traced the edge of the photo with his thumb, not touching the page, just hovering above it. He didn’t feel sadness. He didn’t feel regret. He felt… gratitude.
Gratitude that she had been part of his story, even briefly.
Gratitude that she had appeared in that dream, whatever it was.
Gratitude that some connections, however fleeting, leave marks that last a lifetime.
He closed the yearbook gently and set it aside.
As he sat there, the room quiet around him, he realized something he hadn’t been able to articulate before: the dream wasn’t about the life he didn’t live. It was about the life he did live — and the way the past sometimes reaches forward to remind us of who we were, who we became, and the invisible threads that tie those selves together.
He leaned back, letting the thought settle.
Meaning didn’t always come in answers.
Sometimes it came in questions that stayed with you.
Sometimes it came in the simple act of remembering.
And sometimes — just sometimes — it came in the form of a dream that arrived three days after someone left the world, carrying a message you could feel but never fully understand.
Tom breathed in, slow and steady.
He didn’t need to understand it.
He only needed to honor it.
And he did.
It happened on an ordinary afternoon.
Not a birthday.
Not an anniversary.
Not a day marked by anything special.
Just a quiet, unremarkable moment in a life Tom had grown into with gratitude — a life he valued, a life he wouldn’t trade for any of the paths he’d glimpsed in that dream so many years ago.
He was sitting on a bench outside a small café, sipping a cup of coffee and watching people pass by. The sun was warm. The breeze was soft. The world felt steady in that comforting way it sometimes does when you’re older and have lived enough to appreciate the simple things.
He wasn’t thinking about Sandra.
He wasn’t thinking about the dream.
He wasn’t thinking about the past at all.
And then, without warning, a feeling washed over him — subtle, gentle, unmistakable.
A presence.
Not physical.
Not visible.
Just… there.
The same quiet awareness he’d felt in the dream.
The same sense of being seen, somehow.
The same warmth that didn’t belong to memory or imagination.
He didn’t turn his head.
He didn’t look for anything.
He simply sat with it, letting the moment unfold without trying to name it.
A young couple walked by, laughing.
A child tugged at her mother’s sleeve.
A dog barked at a passing bicycle.
Life moved on, ordinary and beautiful.
And in the middle of it, Tom felt something settle inside him — a calm he hadn’t expected, a clarity he hadn’t asked for.
He realized, in that moment, that the dream had never been about answers.
It had never been about regret.
It had never been about rewriting the past.
It had been about connection.
About acknowledgment.
About the strange, quiet truth that some people leave marks on us that time can’t erase — not because we cling to them, but because they shaped us in ways we didn’t understand until much later.
He closed his eyes for a moment, letting the warmth of the sun rest on his face.
He didn’t speak aloud.
He didn’t need to.
Whatever had happened all those years ago — whatever the dream was, whatever it meant — it had become part of him. Not a burden. Not a mystery to solve. Just a thread woven into the fabric of his life.
A reminder that the past is never as far away as we think.
A reminder that some stories don’t end, they simply change shape.
A reminder that meaning doesn’t always come in explanations — sometimes it comes in presence.
When he opened his eyes again, the feeling had faded.
But the peace remained.
Tom finished his coffee, stood up, and walked home — content in the life he lived, grateful for the paths he chose, and quietly aware that somewhere, in a way he would never fully understand, a connection from long ago had found its way back to him one last time.
Not to change anything.
Not to reopen old doors.
Just to say that it mattered.
And that was enough.
.
TomT2.0 