The House

I went to the house today. I wanted to see if anyone was there.

It was a burned, blackened husk. The fire didn't even look recent. It must have happened weeks, maybe even days after I became unstuck. They can't be dead though. They can't. I've never seen their future selves, but they just can't be dead.

I met Bally. I was looking at the house, at the shell of the only permanent home I had known for a long time, when I heard her. "I knew you would come back," she said and I turned.

The left side of her face was burned. She awkwardly tried to pull a hood over her face and looked down nervously. "I knew you'd come back here," she said again. "I've been waiting. Ever since I got out of the hospital."

"What happened, Bally?" I asked.

"It's a long story," she said.

And then she told it to me. She told me about the fire and, more importantly, who was responsible: I was.

Shelter

I found a homeless shelter where I got some decent clothes and -- thank God -- shoes. Do you know how hard it is to walk barefoot? I kept on trying to avoid broken glass and dog shit.

I went to sleep last night and wondered if I would wake up back in March, but no luck. I've never become unstuck in the future before -- am I stuck here now? Is this now my present?

Still no word from Roland, Mona, or Bally. I'm even more worried, if that's possible.

January

I went to sleep in March and woke up in January. I went to sleep in early spring and woke up in the bleak midwinter. Sometimes I fucking hate being a Pilgrim.

Nobody's picked me up yet. I'm wearing some clothing I found in a dumpster and typing into a library computer while trying to avoid the librarian's steely gaze. Sometimes it takes Roland and the others several hours, but nobody's shown up yet and that's making me slightly worried. I know a me from around this time visited them, so I'm still alive, but I keep being worried that something bad may have happened to Roland and Mona and...well, mostly I'm worried about Bally.

I keep seeing the future version of her, the one with the burned face. Should I try to find the house now? Could I? Or would that fuck with causality or something?

And those posts, from the days before I woke up. Who wrote them? Did the future version of me write them? Why?

This feels different than the other times. I don't know why, it just feels different.

see what's become of me

time

time

time