You never forget your first loop. You rub your eyes, maybe ask someone to hit you in the face, hard.  By the fifth time, you’re expecting buildings to fold in on themselves, you’re watching movies trying to find how to prove you’re in a simulation. You demand answers – from friends, from the internet, from random strangers, from God even. It fucks with you in ways you were absolutely sure you knew how to handle – but no one knows how to handle the same car crashing in front of you twenty times in a row. In short, it’s a total disaster that you relive dozens of times before it clicks that yes, this is your life now.

Perhaps you get lucky, and your first loop is short – seconds, even – and you think you just spaced out for a few minutes, and didn’t see the sugar jar floating back and forth in midair. You caught it, right? Just good reflexes – not at all a break in the time-space continuum. You went about your day with a funny new anecdote that you tell at your next meeting, and maybe later you even get the promotion (but not the raise).  A long drunk night out to celebrate, until it happens again. And again.

With longer loops, you start to see problems.  Things don’t align exactly the way you remember. Lotto numbers change, conversations feel forced, and you stop caring. Still, you fall into the rhythm – a series of optimized choices and consequences – that vastly improves your life. Maybe you gamble on a high-stakes upset on the tracks, or your investments take off. Maybe even plan a long vacation you can’t take. And then you experience a tear for the first time.

One second, you’re humming along to the beat while waiting for the light to change, and the next, you’re in a dense forest. You hear the rustles and scurrying of wildlife, you see your shoes covered in muck, but you still hear the traffic behind you. You instinctively take a step back, and you’re back where you started… sort of. You fail to catch your breath, eyes wide, dizzy. A bank manager comes at you, bypassing the muddy streaks on the rug and reciting interest rates.

Going outside, you can still see it.  It’s a serrated oval window that seems just as oblivious to others as they are to it. Moving closer, you see glimmerings of trees, can feel the heat, until someone bumps you from behind, and it vanishes. If not for the mud, you can almost pretend it didn’t happen… which is the same thing you thought when the loops first started. So now you brace for those as well, and wait for the next breakdown in time. Loop, tear, loop. Tear, tear, tear, loop. Launch yourself through the eighteenth floor window at just the right angle, and you fall through a tear that spits you onto your hotel room bed. At least you now have a good 36 hours before it starts again.

Stop counting the years, and focus on the present. Past? Future? No clue what to call it, but you’re focusing on it. You realize you’ve never seen anyone else noticing these events, but you’re convinced you can’t be the only one. New goal. 

Fucked up to constantly boobytrap things in a loop, but it’s the only thing you can think of to detect whether someone knows what’s about to happen. A few observant souls catch you, but they’re ignorant to everything else – they simply guessed at your intentions. But no matter – someone else has to be out there, but finding them is an exercise in futility.

A few weeks on the calendar, but you’re decades overspent. Eternity and infinity are no longer synonyms of each other, they’re just different definitions of hell. How many times must you relive this minute, hour, day? The only thing worse than the lack of progress is the blank stares when you try to convince someone what you’re going through. And while you’re not sure what happens when you die, you’re starting to wonder if that’s already happened, and you just didn’t realize it. And then things get fucking weird.