Tomorrow Never Comes

"Tomorrow Never Comes" by Melissa Ren

Issue 2.23 | Fiction

Cover Art: L. Erickson

I met her in my dreams. While roaming the empty streets buzzing with azure neon lights, I came face to face with an underground pool. The water rippled like the ocean, as if something greater disturbed its peacefulness. Without thinking, I jumped in.

The ice water devoured me. Or maybe I surrendered—I found no reason to struggle. As I sank to my death, a figure appeared above the surface. A woman.

She hovered beyond the pool’s ledge. Her eyes, two onyx moons, met mine. As my consciousness blurred, she blew me a kiss.

—

I dreamt I climbed up a dirt path toward a cliff. At the top, I stood on the edge to overlook the city blanketed with fog. The neon lights swirled beneath the gloom like watercolors, diluted and soft. The moonlight shone dull, as if through a translucent curtain. Only the silence filled my ears—

“You gonna jump?” a raspy voice asked.

I startled around. A woman sat on a rock, a butterfly knife in hand, a cigarette in the other. The blade swung, dancing through the air in a mesmerizing motion. I stilled.

She tilted her head back to puff a drag as her long black hair caught the wind. Smoke billowed from her lips, disappearing into the crisp night. She pointed her butt at me. “Guess drowning didn’t work out, huh?”

I paused, focusing on the unmistakable sharpness in her eyes. The back of my neck pricked. Did we know each other?

She got up, stomped on her cigarette, slid the knife into her back pocket, and joined me on the edge. “It’s time to give up.”

“No,” I said, without thinking. For some reason, I clasped her warm hand and pressed it to my cheek, like I’d done countless times before.

We did know each other.

I closed my eyes, embracing the softness of her skin, the sweet scent of her palm. Juliette. “I’m going to find you.”

Before she could respond, I released her hand and jumped off the cliff.

—

“We’re stuck in here.” The back of her head thumped against the brick wall. Above, the cerulean glow from the advertisement banner for Lao Gan Ma blinked over her face in hypnotic beats.

I slammed my body against the opposite wall, hoping it’d crack wide open—surely there was more of this place to discover. My shoulder barely stung from the impact. Nothing in this world was absolute. The laws of physics had no place here in my head—in my dreams.

“I was close that one time.” I had never been close. But from the way her veins bulged from her temples, she needed some sense of hope.

“If you were close, you would have woken up,” Juliette bit out, cutting me a side glance as she slumped to the ground. She gripped her hair, burrowing her head between her knees. “It’s suffocating in here. I miss the sun. I never thought I’d say this, but I miss people.”

It was just the two of us here.

Her voice rose. “I roam the streets in circles.” She pulled her head up, glancing left and right. “Where is this place? Do you even know? What fucked up thing happened to you that this perpetual darkness—” she flung an absent hand above her head “—is your subconscious?”

When I was a child, my father locked me in the basement pantry whenever I misbehaved. It was a pint-sized square box with an overhead sapphire bulb. The light’s incessant flickering tormented me. Like most children, I was afraid of the dark, so I kept the light on. To calm myself, I counted my breaths, digging my nails into my palms, as I stared at the bottles of Lao Gan Ma chili sauce on the shelf—my father’s favorite condiment. To this day, he can’t consume a meal without it.

I winced at the memory.

“I’m going to die in here,” Juliette said. “In your goddamn head. Why can’t you wake up? It’s been years.”

In reality, it was probably hours. Worse yet, minutes. We had no concept of time.

The last time I was awake, I’d been sleeping less, three to four hours tops. But that night, I popped a sleeping pill before bed, hoping for a full eight hours of rest. Who knows where Juliette and I were in that timeline of sleep. For both our sakes, I was hoping we were close to the eight-hour mark, but I hadn’t a clue. We had spent years in this dream together.

“Maybe you’re actually dead, and this is your purgatory,” Juliette said.

The thought had crossed my mind months ago. I feared I was stuck in dìyù—earth prison—for my sins, though what those were, I hadn’t a clue. I’m sure my father could string together a few ideas.

I sat on the street beside her. Her warmth radiated off her in waves. “But that doesn’t explain why you’re here.”

The way Juliette remembers it, moments before she entered my dream, she was staring up at her ceiling fan for hours, unable to sleep. She blinked and suddenly found herself on an empty street in a sapphire gloom, still ‘awake,’ barefoot in her PJs.

In my mind, she’d always been here with me. My Juliette. I don’t recall how we met, or our first kiss, or the moment I realized I loved her. My memories teetered between absolute and hazy, as if slipping in and out of reverie, despite already being asleep in the real world.

“Maybe I’m dead too,” she said.

I laughed.

Juliette stood, dusting off the back of her thighs. “This isn’t funny. I’m the one who’s trapped.”

“We both are,” I said, trying to reason with her. This place had a way of winding her up. I get it; unlike me, she’d been completely lucid this entire time.

“No,” Juliette snapped. “You’re still in your own mind while I’m in stuck in yours.” She tilted her head, eyes narrowing on me. “Are you keeping me in here on purpose?”

I shot up to my feet. “Fuck, no. Why would I do that?”

She took a measured step back, as if surprised. I reached for her hand, but she slapped it away. My chest squeezed, just as thunder shook the sky. Juliette didn’t flinch.

“Because you have everything,” she hissed. “You’re sleeping, you’re dreaming, you’re fucking. Why the hell would you want to leave? This is a goddamn paradise for you.” She tugged her hair. “Why couldn’t I see it before? You don’t love me, you love you. This whole thing has always been about you.”

My jaw dropped to the floor. “You’re joking, right? I’ve been trying to kill myself hour after hour for you. I’m trying to wake myself up to help you. Not me—you!” My blood ran hot in my veins. Hadn’t I promised I’d find her once we were both awake in the real world?

She stared at me in that dismissive way when she couldn’t be bothered.

My insides crumbled. “You don’t believe me,” I said in a whisper. I stepped back, dragging a hand over my mouth.

Juliette’s gaze scrolled down my body, assessing me. “I think we’ve gone about this all wrong.”

Static trembled in my ears. Above, the neon lights crackled like firecrackers.

She pulled out the butterfly knife from her back pocket. My chest tightened.

“Juliette,” I croaked.

With the flick of her wrist, the blade swung free. “When you wake, don’t come looking for me.” She slid a finger over the titanium, its gleam piercing my vision. I winced. Thunder boomed.

“What are you doing?” I rasped, my heart in my throat.

“We’re over.” She took the blade to her neck and sliced.

“Juliette!”

I jolted out of sleep, drenched in sweat, Juliette a million miles away. Across the universe. Somewhere.

—

You’d think a person’s online imprint could tell you everything about their life: full-time job, geographical location, hobbies, friendships or who they dated three years ago. But not for Juliette Ng.

She was gone.

I hired a private detective, combed through death records, and when reality hit me in the gut, birth records.

She didn’t exist.

But I refused to believe it. I could still taste her lips on mine. The feel of her warm skin pressing up against me. The low growl of her voice when she whispered my name.

She was real.

It had been six years, eight weeks, and three days since I last saw her, since her eyes locked on mine in disbelief. I had popped so many fucking sleeping pills to take me back to her. But nothing worked. Instead, it left me wired, on edge, and, at times, hallucinatory. I saw her everywhere, except in my dreams.

That night, as I lay in bed, eyes wide, the hypnotic movements of the ceiling fan blurred my vision. In one blink, I found myself standing somewhere else.

Barefoot, on an empty street.

—

Melissa Ren is a Chinese-Canadian writer whose narratives tend to explore the intersection between belonging and becoming. She is a prize recipient of Room Magazine’s Fiction Contest, a Tin House alum, a grant recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts, and a senior editor at Augur Magazine. Find her at linktr.ee/MelissaRen or follow @melisfluous on socials.