Limbo.

It’s all different. It’s all changed. Night comes so much quicker than it used to. I don’t remember it getting this dark this early before. But I’m sure it did. I’m sure it was always like this, I’m sure….I just don’t remember anymore. I can’t tell you what month we’re in, or what day. I can barely tell you what year we’re in, or my name. So I can’t tell you much at all, but I like it better this way. Isn’t that kind of scary? I am forgetting everything and I’ve never been happier.

Mostly.

The sky fell last night and I caught it with my face. Last Tuesday, it exploded and it cut my body in half. Tonight, it hangs low, a cautionary sign: don’t move too fast or you’ll trip over yourselves. A hesitating fog-shy, too-tentatively coats the atmosphere in a still shade of grey, overlaying the lavender and pink twilight sky like a smoke screen. If you walk far enough, far into the fog, far into the past, you’ll disappear without a trace. And that’s so tempting, isn’t it? To leave and never be found.

I can teach you how to do that, if you want me to. But I’m really not supposed to. No one’s watching me, so I won’t get in trouble, but if I show you how to disappear-really, how to time travel-it might break you. The human body cannot handle time travel because the human body is not meant to time travel.

Each trip rips you apart little by little; over time, you are fragmented into a hundred thousand separate parts; and by that point, you are no longer in your body and you no longer have any solid semblance of self. However, if you were fragmented to begin with, like I was and still am, then each trip is an opportunity to put yourself back together. Funny how that works.

I did it backwards, and that was not on purpose. I was just trying to survive, so I fragmented myself over and over. It was a well-meaning accident every time I did it. I broke my brain and then I started unconsciously time-traveling. And now I’m here: in Limbo.

Limbo is a haunt, a lonely, isolating in-between. It is not a forever place, but it could be if you’re scared like me. Limbo is a moment that ceases to exist as soon as you leave it. And I’ve overstayed my welcome for three and a half years because I’m not ready to leave it just yet.

–

Sometimes other people appear in Limbo, but they’re all unaware of me, even if I shapeshift to get their attention. I make myself sixty feet tall and wave my inflatable arms like a roadside attraction, stomping through the streets like a sympathetic beast, intentionally leaving craters in the rubbery asphalt and sparkling concrete. These are Stage 1 sinkholes to swallow them up, but they walk around my markings like spilled milk on the road.

I do acrobatics on top of speeding trucks and trains, resisting wind as if it’s just a small breath of air, contorting my body in ways that are anatomically impossible in your world, and all that the other people feel is my rush, me in the form of a warm, dry breeze tickling their soft, unfazed faces. So I get real close, standing centimeters away from them; I lick their cheeks and push my fingers through their necks until they come out on the other side; I bite off their shoulders and use their clavicles as walking canes; I blow my eyes out of my sockets like strings of confetti, and I pull my head off my torso like a rabbit out the hat-and still nothing.

Even as I walk home with my head propped against my waist, my eyes drooling down my face, and I wear my pants like a top and my shirt like a skirt, none of these people notice me. They keep walking by, completely unaware that I’m here, that I exist. That I’m real. They don’t see me at all, so I walk home, in this world alone, with a smile on what’s left of my face.

Tonight, the streets are slick, covered in the glimmering sheen of afternoon rain that doesn’t want to evaporate. But neither do I. For all my big talk of disappearing, parts of me stay put. I’ve got myself chained down to this version of here because I’m still scared of moving forward. So I meander, walk around with no seeming end in sight. The only end I can see is the faint sense of ‘there. ‘There’ is where I’m supposed to be so ‘there’ is where I push myself to go.

But I don’t know where or what ‘there’ is, so I walk and walk and know that I’ll find it one day-because I’m persistent, relentless, filled with desire that won’t subside-but I haven’t made it ‘there’ and the difference between here and ‘there’ looms large most days.

Pushing myself ‘there’ hurts. I drag my feet while doing so. My knees ache. My chest and back, too. My left wrist dangles off my arm like a wilted flower. My face droops toward the ground, and my locked jaw is the only thing keeping the skin somewhat where it should be. I am in chronic pain every day, but I keep going. All of this is a symptom of too much time-traveling I’ve come to learn, but I can’t stop. I won’t.

I’m split across time and have been for over twenty-nine years. The only way to put myself back together is to go back into the past and close the survival loops that keep these memories open, these parts of me unintegrated, my timeline erratic and unstable.

And once I do that, I will be whole: one me, one stable timeline, and one reality (supposedly). No more limbo. No more any of this. And no more me as I’ve known myself to be.

How willing am I to forget myself forever?