Last night, I had a dream that left me with an unsettling feeling long after I woke up.

I found myself surrounded by people from different chapters of my life. What struck me was that I was my present age, but they remained frozen in the age when I had last known them.

Princess, my friend from my second company, was there. She told me she was leaving for a new company. I smiled and replied that I already knew she had moved on from the company where we once worked together. I told her how much I missed the days when we used to hang out after work.

She didn’t respond. Her face was blank, devoid of emotion. Then she simply walked away, disappearing among a pile of junked cars. The surroundings looked post-apocalyptic—desolate, eerie, and abandoned. Watching her vanish filled me with an inexplicable sense of loss.

Then Didith, my grade school classmate, appeared. We were never particularly close, which made her presence in my dream all the more puzzling. She stood silently, gazing at us with her big, expressive eyes. In my dream, she was still the twelve-year-old girl I had known decades ago.

A moment later, Elizabeth appeared, wearing our high school uniform. In my dream, I remember thinking, How could she be here when she had already passed away?

She pointed toward a swing and quietly told me that she used to sit there and spend hours swinging as a child. The scene shifted, and I saw her sitting on the swing, gently moving back and forth with a peaceful smile on her face.

Then I woke up.

There was a quiet heaviness in my heart.

Perhaps it was because these three women each represented a different season of my life—my childhood, my teenage years, and my early adulthood. They reminded me that life keeps moving forward. Some people leave, some drift away, and some leave this world altogether.

What stayed with me most was this: in my dream, I had grown older, but they had not. They remained exactly as I remembered them. It made me realize that memories have a way of preserving people, keeping them forever in the version we last knew.

Time is fleeting. People move on for reasons we may never fully understand. Yet somewhere in our memories, they remain unchanged, quietly waiting to visit us again—sometimes in a dream, reminding us of the lives we once shared.