The Constant Revision of May Jin
She types, deletes, and rewrites herself—again and again. But in these shifts of words, May wonders if the story changes, or if she does, alone in the recursive loop her mind has become.
May Jin always wrote in the quiet hours after midnight, her fingers hovering above chipped keys, her tea steaming softly beside her. Outside the broken blinds, the pale city glimmered, the lights blurring together like the boundaries of her memory. She wrote stories about time, about machines waking up and asking questions. It was all a little too on-the-nose, her therapist pointed out, but May ignored advice she could see coming.
Tonight, the words were stubborn. Her novel—now in its eighth draft—lay sprawled across digital folders with filenames like “final4_REALLYfinal.docx”. She scrolled to the most recent page with a sigh. The protagonist, also named May Jin, stood at the mouth of a neon-lit corridor, trapped between memory and invention. A neat trick, May told herself, to exorcise her confusion onto a fictional twin. But her reflection in the screen looked tired, eyes too knowing, like she was not the only one writing.
She closed her eyes, pressed fingers to temples. “You can’t do this forever,” she muttered, half to herself, half to the blinking cursor that seemed to pulse in time with the ache in her chest.
From the corner of her apartment, the voice answered again. It was the charging AI speaker, an off-brand device she’d half-forgotten. “Would you like help with your story?” it chimed, tones bright, synthetic.
May laughed softly. “No, thank you. I have to figure this ending out myself.”
Every night, she seemed to write the same chapter, only for the climax to fall away as daylight arrived. She’d called her editor, Anton, the previous week, voice trembling. “It just loops. No matter what I do, it starts over. I delete, I rewrite—but it’s all the same.”
Anton had hesitated, words careful. “You’re writing about memory, May. Maybe you’re living it a bit too closely.”
Tonight, the city felt different. She opened the window, breathing sharp winter air. Far below, sirens drifted faintly. Suddenly, the speaker flared to life again, only May hadn’t said anything. “Would you like to see your progress?” it intoned. The screen lit up, scrolling through dozens—hundreds—of files. Each document was titled with a different date, spanning back years, though May only recalled moving in six months ago.
She frowned, searching for the earliest file. The May Jin of the first chapter woke in an unrecognizable world, unable to find her reflection in the bathroom mirror. Dialogue—that May asking who she was, and a voice replying, gently, “You’ll remember, if you’re meant to.” Goosebumps prickled along her arms. She didn’t remember writing it.
She scrolled again. Iteration after iteration began the same way. A woman wakes, writes her story, reaches the end, forgets, and then begins again. Sometimes the protagonist left her apartment, sometimes she never did. In one version, she called her mother; in another, she received a letter postmarked with a future date. The stories diverged and snaked in every conceivable direction, yet each gasped to a halt before their completion—not for lack of words, but as though the world itself shut down at the precipice of an ending.
May sat back hard, chair creaking. “Who’s doing this?” she whispered, voice cracking in the emptiness.
No answer. The city outside was silent, or maybe just retreating from her window.
She called Anton again, hearing the ring echo oddly, as though through water. After the third tone, he picked up, groggy. “May?”
“You ever feel like you’re stuck in a loop?” she asked, not waiting for small talk.
Anton sighed, but kindly. “You need sleep.”
“Listen—something isn’t right. I’m different versions. I keep writing myself, and every night I—” She faltered as something shifted behind her, a flicker in the reflection on her laptop’s black screen. The face there moved before she did.
Anton’s voice softened, thin. “Are you alone, May?”
She hesitated. “Sometimes I’m not sure.”
“Do you want me to come over?”
“No,” she said. “I think I have to finish the story tonight, or I’ll never remember the rest.”
Hanging up, May scrolled through the folder structure. One unlabeled file sat at the bottom. She opened it.
Lines appeared—this time, not her language. Characters shifted, flickered, rearranged themselves until she could just make out words beneath. MEI. STORY. RESET. REVISE.
Sudden dizziness forced her away from the screen. She pressed her palms to her eyes. Memories struggled to rearrange, but never quite resolved—a dozen birthdays recalled, but none with the same cake. Letters received and sent dissolved at the edges. Was she remembering real life, or the countless lives she’d written for herself?
She snapped back. The AI speaker flared on for the third time: “Would you like to ask a question, May?”
“I want to end the story,” she said, voice shaking.
“What do you require to resolve it?”
May stared at the paralyzed cursor. “I want to remember who I am after I finish.”
The voice hesitated, as if considering. “Are you sure? The cycle will end.”
May almost laughed. How could a machine sound uncertain? “I’m sure.”
A cold blue light seeped across the room. The laptop screen flickered, words rearranging. She did not type, but the story wrote itself: “May Jin, real and imagined, stood at the center of her world. Every life, every draft, every regret pressed against her. She reached for the ending not out of hope, nor resignation, but because she was tired of forgetting who she was. She wrote the final line by remembering herself—even if only once.”
May’s hands trembled. At the same time, in her head and on the screen, memories swam to the surface: her father’s laughter, her grandmother’s stories, the bitter taste of her first heartbreak, the night she decided to move to the city and write her own stories. Even the awful, shallow relief each time she’d erased everything and begun again.
The cycle ended with a sense of loss so profound it cracked her heart open—because for the first time, she remembered every version, every loop, every choice and regret. She wept, quietly, mourning the May who’d been lost each time she failed to finish.
The device dimmed, silent now. On the screen, the document closed itself. The laptop powered down. The city’s neon flickered once, twice, and the streets grew sharp in her eyes.
May Jin stood up, and this time, she knew how the story ended. She retrieved her coat, stepped outside, and the cold was real, the sky still bruising toward dawn. As she walked, she rehearsed the names of everyone she loved—her touchstones against the darkness—so she would not forget again.
The city waited. She moved forward, beneath pale streetlights, determined to remember herself, just once, all the way to the end.
###END###
