She had a recurring dream, one that kept her awake most nights. It made her heart race and her palms sweat. And that night, it happened again. She wiped the dewy beads from her forehead as she sat up thinking about it. The never-ending mall spread across acres of land. The biblical hand-painted high ceilings were a spectacle to behold. The spiralling staircases, the branded stores, the unoccupied casino, the false sky ceiling, the gondolas and the mannequins with the empty eyes. They made her mind a ball of blur. Suddenly, she felt smaller than she had felt in a while. The mall grew and she was lost. The stores towered above her like eagles waiting to prey on the dead. The mannequins stared blatantly from all directions, right at her. Cut.
She stared at the mannequin looking at her and stopped in her tracks. Fact: this wasn’t a dream. She was at The Venetian in Macao. A chill went down her spine as she saw the biblical painting, the spiral staircase, the false ceiling and the bustling casino… she had been here before. The dewy beads reappeared on her forehead as the never ending mall grew before her. She ran towards the restaurant to get a glass of wine to soothe her senses. And it worked. She guzzled it down and ordered the three-cheese pizza to go with it. In between sipping on the divine stem of rosé wine and savouring the goodness of the cheesy pizza, she thought—maybe her mind was playing tricks and she just needed to eat something. But then as she got up to walk out of the door, she heard a whisper in her ear. “You’ve come after a lot of calling. Now, you can’t leave.”