Dead Reckoning
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 14
I have been thinking about dreams.
Not the kind that come in sleep. The other kind. The ones people carry inside themselves like a compass, the thing they are moving toward, the life they are building in the direction of something chosen and personal and entirely their own.
I have been thinking about them because I have never had one.
I want to be precise about this because it is the truest thing I know and I have promised myself precision until the end.
I am not saying I never wanted things. I wanted survival and I pursued it with everything I had and I was extraordinarily good at it. I wanted Thomas safe on his island and I carry that want still. I wanted Anne to live and I believe she is living and I hold that belief with both hands.
But those are not dreams.
A dream requires a self.
A stable, continuous, uncontested self that knows its own name and face and gender and place in the world and from that stable ground looks forward and says — that. I want that. Not because it will keep me alive or protect me or serve someone else’s survival. Because I want it. Because I am a person and persons want things for themselves and I am allowed to want this.
I never had that ground to stand on.
I was my brother before I could walk. I was a boy before I could choose. I was a soldier because the alternative was prey. I was a pirate because the alternative was invisible. I was someone else every single day of my life from the moment my mother put my dead brother’s clothes on my body and taught me to answer to his name.
I never stood still long enough in my own skin to find out what I might have wanted from it.
That is what was taken from me.
Not the name. Not the gender. Not the freedom or the years or the safety or the love. Those losses are real and I have recorded them faithfully on these pages.
But underneath all of them is this one.
The dream I never got to have.
The self I never got to be long enough to find out what she wanted.
I do not know what I would have dreamed. I have tried to imagine it here in this cell in the hours when the fever allows imagination and I find I cannot construct it with any confidence. A room of my own perhaps. Work that was mine. A name that was mine from birth, used openly, no performance required. The ordinary unremarkable life of a woman who wakes in the morning and knows exactly who she is and has known it since childhood and has never once had to calculate whether that knowledge is safe to display.
I cannot fully imagine it.
That is the measure of what was taken.
When you are robbed of something before you are old enough to know you have it you cannot fully reconstruct what it was. You can only feel the shape of its absence. The outline of the thing that should have been there and wasn’t.
I have felt that outline my entire life.