Emma has spent years moving through her life without quite feeling part of it.

She is a mother, a woman with responsibilities, and someone who has learned how to keep going even when something inside her has gone quiet. From the outside, life continues. Days pass, routines are followed and everything appears to be moving forward.

But Emma feels as though she is watching it all from somewhere far away.

Grief has changed the shape of her world. Familiar places no longer feel quite the same, memories have blurred at the edges, and somewhere between everything she has lost and everything she has had to become, Emma has lost touch with parts of herself too. 

Then the moments begin.

Without warning or explanation, Emma starts waking inside forgotten moments from her own past.

Not the milestones or dramatic events people usually hold onto, but the small moments that once seemed ordinary.

A childhood kitchen.

The smell of toast.

A familiar voice.

A hand reaching for hers.

A laugh she has not heard in years.

Places she thought were gone suddenly surround her again. People exist exactly as she remembers them. Moments that had disappeared beneath years of living are suddenly real enough to touch. 

But there are rules Emma does not understand.

She cannot choose where she goes.

She cannot stay.

And she cannot change what has already happened.

All she can do is be there.

As the memories continue to find her, Emma begins to see her past differently. Moments that once seemed insignificant take on new meaning. She notices things she missed the first time. She feels emotions she had buried and begins to understand just how much of the person she once was is still there.

Each return brings love and loss painfully close, but it also reconnects Emma with the people, places and pieces of herself that grief had convinced her were gone forever.

Slowly, the question changes.

It is no longer simply why she keeps returning to the past.

It is what those moments are trying to show her about the life she is living now.

*The Places I Wake* is a deeply emotional story about memory, motherhood, grief, family, identity and the extraordinary importance of seemingly ordinary moments.

It explores what happens when life changes us so completely that we no longer recognise the person we have become, and what it might take to find our way back.

For anyone who has ever been unexpectedly transported by a smell, a song, an old house or a memory they thought they had forgotten, this is a story about the places we carry with us.

About the people who remain part of us long after they are gone.

About love that survives loss.

And about discovering that sometimes finding your way home does not mean returning to a place.

Sometimes, it means finding your way back to yourself.