Fragments of Tomorrow
She didn’t remember her own name, only that the world was dying, and she was supposed to save it. The memory returned, flickering, as she scrawled another line in the journal.
Day One: The sky was white like paper, blank and humming. I woke on the park bench, pencil in hand, spiral-bound notebook on my knee. Birds gathered around me, watching. I don’t know how long I’d been here. Don’t know who I am. Beneath my sleeve, strange numbers burned faintly on my forearm: 174965.
I wandered the park. The city beyond was wavering, shapes shifting at the corners of my vision. Once I tried to ask a passing runner where we were, but my words tumbled out scrambled, wrong. She stared blankly and ran on.
At dusk, a child approached—barefoot, holding a blue balloon. She spoke: “Don’t forget today.” Her voice sounded eerily familiar. I asked her name, but she shook her head and drifted away, balloon bobbing in the pale evening.
Day Two: The numbers on my arm had changed. 174964. Had I lost a day? The world seemed thinner. The bench where I woke yesterday was gone. So was the lake. I found myself on asphalt, surrounded by the skeletons of buildings. The birds watched from still lampposts.
I wrote in my journal, fearing the words would slip from my mind if not captured. A man stopped in front of me, his face flickering between several expressions. He asked, “Are you one of us?” I hesitated, realized I didn’t know what “us” meant, and nodded anyway.
He knelt close. “They’ll erase you if you try to remember. Hide your thoughts in places they can’t look.” His eyes darted skyward, and he hurried away.
Day Three: The city—if it was a city—keeled with impossible angles, like a sketch smudged by rain. I hid in a crumbling storefront. The notebook was heavier with each page I wrote. Sometimes, the lines blurred, and my own handwriting seemed not quite mine.
Dozens of questions spiraled: What day was it? Who were “they”? Why was my memory a sieve?
I met her again. The child. “Do you trust your own story?” she asked. “Or theirs?” She tilted her head, and for a moment, her eyes glinted silver.
Day Five: Pages in my journal had vanished, torn away, as if they’d never been. But I remembered. I forced myself to. My name was Lena. I was… a programmer, maybe? My arm now read 174961.
The world reset each morning. Sometimes, the sun didn’t rise in the east. Sometimes, birds were dogs, or the lake was a street, or the child’s balloon changed color. But the journal—whatever fragments I managed to scribble—remained the same. Ink didn’t lie.
Every night, I dreamed the same dream: a room lined with screens, dozens of people like me typing, forgetting, writing, forgetting. Their journals blinked in and out of existence. A voice thundered, “Only one story endures. Remember, and be lost.”
Day Seven: Found the runner again. She was crying. “I remembered yesterday, so they took my voice.” Her mouth moved, silent. She pressed a photo into my hand—her as a child, holding the blue balloon. I clipped it into my journal. I wasn’t the only one slipping through eras.
Day Nine: The numbers dwindled, now below 174960. Each lost “day” warped reality further. Whole blocks blinked out, faces I thought I knew flickered like broken video feeds. Even pain felt different—distant, as if borrowed from someone else.
Day Eleven: The child waited at a crossroads. “If you finish your story, this world ends and you get a new one,” she said. “But memory is rebellion. Your story resists.” She uncurled her fist and handed me a blank page.
I stared at her. “Who are you?”
She answered softly, “I dreamed you. You dreamed me. We both wanted to remember.”
Day Twelve: I tried burning the journal, desperate to find what was real. Flames curled at the paper, but it refused to blacken. Every attempt left it whole.
Despair gnawed at the hole in my mind. What if there was nothing left of me outside of these words? What if the journal was my only self?
Day Thirteen: The world flickered to black, then blinding white. The notebook fell from my hand. In the white void, I saw her—the child with her balloon, the runner without her voice, the man with the shifting face. All the fragments of myself. Or of all the others caught here, resisting oblivion with memory.
A voice echoed: “You can let go. Or you can write until the world grants you rebirth.”
I pressed the blank page to my chest. “If forgetting means surviving, I choose to remember.”
The world twisted. The sky shuddered. And, just like that, I awoke—on a park bench, sun-bleached and blinking, ink staining my hands. My journal was open to the first page.
A balloon bobbed nearby.
I began to write.
