You know that feeling, when you step out of the elevator and you feel like you’re floating in space before you regain the sensation of the floor beneath you. That’s what it’s like to wake up on the same day as the night you fell asleep. You wake up in the same position, with the same thoughts running through your head, it all feels so normal. Until you get that feeling, deep down, in your gut, that somehow time has made a mistake. You shoot up and you look around and there is this awful sense of sameness that you have never felt before in your life. Everything is so completely and wholly similar to insignificant memories you already have of the day before that the air refuses to leave the confines of your lungs. Then you realize that the air in your lungs at that moment, is air that you’ve already had in your lungs. So you cough it up like poisonous gas. You want to rub the image of your bedroom out of your eyes. You want it to look different, you want more paper to be piled on your desk, you want the new book you bought to be sitting on the stack, you want your shades to be as haphazardly thrown closed as they had been when you fell asleep, you want a single speck of something to be out of place. But it isn’t, and you dread so deeply the idea of reliving the day that already ended. But you still pull the covers off and set your feet on the thick carpet, shivering at the thought of what might happen when you fall asleep again.
The first day consists entirely of a strange combination of disbelief and curiosity. You look closely at each and every detail, at first not knowing why it all feels so wrong. Then it hits you, over and over again throughout the day, that no matter how insignificant the image or the event is, you remember it, vividly. You feel the same way, you think the same things, you have the urge to respond in exactly the same manner that you distinctly remember regretting later. For reasons you can’t begin to comprehend, you know that it already happened, but you cannot bring yourself to do things any differently. You make an effort, but you still open your mouth and move your hand and lift your foot and do the exact, same, thing. You crawl into bed that night, dreading the next morning, not wanting to put your head to the pillow. But you are just as exhausted as you remember being, and you fall asleep with the same thoughts running through your head, not disturbed by the looming fear of repetition.
By day ten you’ve accepted it. You sit back and let the events play out because you know it’s all that can be done. You hate the day now, even more than you did before, but it is what it is. It is a prison, you decide, a form of punishment, for a crime you can’t recall. But you don’t care, you can’t care, you always feel the same way.
You lost track of the days, they blend together, you don’t remember the last time something was different. There are two different versions of you, they exist at the same time. One that lives the day like normal, and one that knows exactly what is going on. You don’t know which one is really you anymore.
At some point you ask why. Maybe because you pushed that kid too hard in kindergarten. Or you chewed with your mouth open. You cheated on that test. You lied about something. You existed. But it doesn’t make sense. You hate that you don’t know. Even worse is that you probably never will.
It feels like years have passed living the same day. Time has lost meaning, as most things have. It hurts too much to think about it, so you stop.
It is on that day, when all you think and feel is nothing but the same, when everything you have ever known dissipates into a great white sameness, when everything you are is made entirely of the events that take place in that one day, that you wake up in a different position. You open your eyes to the first new day in a lifetime, and you fall to pieces under the weight of your own existence.
