You weren't supposed to be there.

You weren't a dream, but you didn't feel real either—just silent light spinning across my ceiling like a warning I couldn't read. That low, mournful siren faded as it turned into the driveway next door, and suddenly the world felt thin.

I tiptoed to the window, still clutching the safety of my blanket, watching adults move with strange urgency in the dark. Faces lit in flashes, words I couldn't hear, gestures I didn't understand.

No one screamed. No one explained. And in the hallway, my parents whispered like conspirators.

Someone next door had become fragile.

And I didn't know people could just break like that.

You were my first taste of the grown-up world slipping into the seams of childhood—of emergencies that didn't look like fire or storms, but a quiet knock, a stretcher, a ride into the unknown.

The next morning, no one talked about it, but I kept glancing at their house, wondering if they were okay, wondering what "not okay" even meant.

You weren't just an ambulance. You were the first time the night didn't feel like a blanket. The first time I understood that things could go wrong quietly.

Not with fire and fury, but with a knock. A pause. A door closing softly behind someone who might not come back.

After that, the dark never really felt the same.

This has been a love letter to a forgotten thing, and the way that the flashing blues and reds still make us freeze, even when we think we're used to it.