The galaxy fit in the palm of her hand and in the cracks of her wall.
It hummed on the cheap bedside table, cables like plastic veins crawling to the only working outlet in the room. Outside, the city screamed in neon and drone rotors, rain dragging advertisements down the glass. Inside, the projector opened a hole in the dark: rings of impossible blue, slow spirals of light that washed over the peeling bricks and the tired curve of her shoulders.
She had paid for it in slices of life — extra shifts, rented sleep hours, a few small lies. The real thing was for people above the smog line: tourists who booked orbital cruises with a blink and a credit ping, who toasted champagne while gravity pretended not to exist. For them, space was another package: premium, exclusive, insured. For her, it was an error message on every travel site, a red “insufficient funds” pulsing like a wound.
So she travelled where they couldn’t follow. She sat cross-legged on the thin mattress, face tilted up, letting the projected stars spill into her eyes. In her head, the room dissolved; the pipes became constellations, the humming fridge a distant sun. She walked along those rings of light barefoot, naming anonymous planets after people who had forgotten her, promising them she would never do the same. In that small, rented universe, no one asked for tickets. No one checked balances.
When the timer beeped and the galaxy died back into plastic and silence, the room shrank again. The city pushed in through the half-broken blinds, all noise and invoices and tomorrow’s hunger. She lay down without turning off the old monitor, its blue standby light blinking like a lost star. Maybe she would never leave this concrete orbit. Maybe her passport would always be a fragile thing made of wishes. Still, every night she pressed the button, watched the universe bloom on the wall, and thought: if all I can do is dream, then I’ll dream far enough that money can’t reach me.