I am alone. Not a single personal connection could ever change that. I will never have a family, and I will never have a friend, ever again. From my perspective, on this day twenty years ago… that was the first day.
06/17/2015
It was the day of the Charleston Church Shooting, nine innocent black churchgoers were shot and killed by a pathetic racist in South Carolina. My first thought that something wasn’t right was when I sat at the breakfast table with my mom, and asked her what her thoughts on the Confederate flag still flying in South Carolina were, in regard to the shooting. That seemed to be the hot topic at the time. She told me she hadn’t heard about any shooting. My heart was broken for the families of those that lost loved ones, and according to my phone, as I pressed the home button to see the time, it hadn’t even happened yet.
This was my state of confusion. Was June seventeenth a dream? A nightmare? The day was spent drowning in deja vu. Until late that night articles started pouring into Facebook about the shooting. I had to question whether or not I had somehow become psychic. I’m fully aware that that is not possible, but I have begun to question my logic. The next day changed everything.
06/16/2015
I woke to a familiar bang outside. I had experienced this morning before. There was seemingly no end to the clutch deja vu held on my mind. I still didn’t know what the sound was, though. I immediately checked my phone when the confusion settled. My pulse rose and my breaths became deep when I read the date: June sixteenth.
I got up and again I asked my mom about the shooting. She knew nothing. I asked her what the date was. She told me “Tuesday the sixteenth.” The feeling that I was going absolutely insane lasted for about a week. The existential crisis has yet to end.
06/15/2015
The next day I tried to fool it. Whatever it is. I stayed up for nearly seventy-two hours, and I experienced it all again. The bang waking me on the sixteenth (it was a car backfiring, of course), and the flood of news about the shooting, but when I could no longer stay awake, I woke up on the fourteenth.
06/14/2015
I sunk inside myself. I had hardly spoken to anyone, and when my friends would try to contact me I would ignore them. Nobody ever thought anything of it, because no matter what day it was, or how long I went without talking to them, I had always just talked to them the day before. At least from their perspective.
I decided to test something. I shaved, and took a shower, then I drew an X on the back of my hand, and that night I did something completely out of the ordinary: I slept in a hoodie, and I put a ball of elastics in the pocket. I needed to see what was physically happening to me while I slept.
06/13/2015
I woke up in the hoodie with a ball of elastics in my pocket. The X was still on my hand. I check for stubble but unfortunately (or fortunately?) my hair grows slow, so I would have to wait to see the next day. However, I could pretty much guarantee that on the thirteenth, the last time I lived it, I was not clean shaven. My conclusion, that would be confirmed the next day: I am still aging, and I am not taking the physical place of my previous self. But then what is happening to my future self?
Imagine there is a multiverse, and with every passing moment a new universe is created with every possibility. Every day that I return to, do my family and friends in all future universes wake up with me having simply vanished from existence? I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.
06/12/2015
Around nine in the morning on the twelfth, I realized how complicated this was going to be. I wish I had kept a journal for my whole life. This was when my friends Kennedy and Bailey called me. I had forgotten that I had stayed over at their house on Thursday night, I was supposed to wake up there.
“Is everything alright?”
“Yeah, I just wasn’t feeling well so I walked home. I didn’t want to wake you guys,” I replied.
“So you’re not upset about anything?” Bailey asked.
“No, no, why would I be upset?”
“Sometimes, you never know. I’m glad you’re okay, though.” We said goodbye and I realized that this would be they last time they ever talk to me. Of course, I would talk to them more, and every time that I talk to them it would be the new last conversation we ever had. Eventually, I assume that I will have never been a part of their life. But I just don’t understand how this works. This is not supposed to happen, and for decades I’ve been telling myself it’s just a dream that I will wake up from.
I could feel the loneliness filling me, and I knew that I could do nothing about it. So for a few weeks, I did some favors. On fridays I would pay attention to the LottoMax numbers drawn. On Thursday I would buy a ticket for it with those numbers, and presumably, the people that I gave those tickets to would never go hungry. But, who knows if the things that I do now have an effect on the future? I gave winning tickets to my parents, and to all those that I care about. I made a list of terrible events that could be prevented if only someone knew they would happen. I still question whether this is the right thing to do. If someone knew that Dylann Roof was planning to shoot up that church in Charleston, it could have been stopped. But did that tragic event spur change that maybe would save thousands of lives? I don’t know. But I called it in, because I couldn’t let those people die if I could prevent it.
Every day got harder. My mom would notice my hair magically jumping in length, and everyone noticed my sudden decent into depression. I was, after all, quite a happy person before things changed.
After a 3 months I stopped trying to remember the things I had done on the day that I woke up, and I just left. I walked, I hitchhiked, I bussed, I cabbed, and I got away from everything I knew. I did some things that I would never have done if I didn’t have time on my side, but the problem was that I could never help myself.
I once robbed a billionaire of several hundred thousand dollars. All I needed to do was not get caught until I woke up the previous morning, and I would have money and nobody would be after me, because I hadn’t technically stolen it yet. But if I were to buy a house, the next morning I would wake up in a house I didn’t own yet. Plus I needed to keep my cash physically with me, because if I banked it, it would be gone the previous day.
02/12/1997
Flash forward 18 years. Or backward. Whatever. The day I was born. I figured this was it, the end of my existence. Eighteen years forward, eighteen years backward. I sat alone in my sadness, beneath the windows of the hospital that I was born in. I wondered what was happening in there, if I was standing here, a thirty-six year old awaiting my birth. I assumed, that it would all end the moment I was born, which I recall being told was around noon. It should have ended right? Thats what always happens in fiction. The major moments line up, and boom, it’s over.
Noon passed, and then night fell. I went to my usual hotel, and I slept, only to wake on the day before I was born, and as usual, get kicked out, because I wasn’t supposed to be there.
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Credits to: Chris Smith (http://christovixwrites.tumblr.com/)
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