I was a perfectly normal child living in Seattle.
I liked playing with friends, joking around, and playing games.
I sometimes had dreams, and even when I did, I couldn’t remember them.
I was just that kind of ordinary child.
But then something big changed.
One day, when I was thirteen.
When I woke up after sleeping…
My mother was crying beside me.
“Mom, where am I?”
“Luke, are you okay?
Are you hurt anywhere?”
“No.
I just feel like I slept and woke up.
But why am I in a hospital?”
“You’ve been in the hospital for three months.
You never woke up even once.
Do you know how worried Mom was?”
I couldn’t understand those words.
Three months without waking up even once?
I just slept and woke up like it was a nap.
My mother hugged me tightly.
The day the Room of Choices first appeared to me…
was the night before I was supposed to leave for a church summer camp in middle school.
Me, who wanted to go, and my parents, who opposed it.
That day, I had to choose between “go” and “not go.”
In reality, I chose not to go.
Because the church bus that went in my place…
crashed on the way, and all passengers died.
Like this…
whenever an important choice appeared in my life, it would also appear in my dreams without fail.
Sometimes it saved my life.
Sometimes it changed my life into the one I chose.
So in those dreams…
I lived countless lives that ordinary people only get to live once.
These days…
I sometimes get confused.
Whether this life is my real life…
or whether the life I experienced in dreams is the real one.
I came to understand one thing.
The life in those dreams becomes reality exactly as it is seen.
But only when I make a choice.
Just like when I rejected Annie’s proposal today.
Even if I make a choice…
if I make another choice in the middle, the content of that life changes.
My life is being written like a novel according to my choices.
If the story turns out good…
I follow it.
If not…
I choose differently and rewrite it.
In this story…
an unexpected variable had appeared.
Like Annie’s case…
or Hannah’s case.
These were things that did not exist in the dreams I had before.
A variable had occurred.
Still, it doesn’t matter.
I can erase that variable.
This is my best cheat code.
At least the direction of my life is being written by me.
Today…
the Room of Choices will come for me again.
Because the novel written up to yesterday…
has been reset.