The first time it happened, I woke up in 1987. I knew because of the calendar on my neighbor’s wall – the one I could see from my window – and because everything smelled different. Cleaner, somehow. Like the air had more room in it.
I did not panic. That is the part people never believe when I tell them. I just lay there, looking at the ceiling, doing the math. Thirty-seven years. Give or take. I had gone to sleep at 11:43 PM on a Tuesday in what I knew as the present, and I had woken up somewhere else entirely.
The rules, I have since worked out, are these: I always wake up in the same room. The same bed. The same ceiling with its familiar crack running from the light fixture to the window. But the year is wrong. Sometimes slightly wrong – a decade, maybe two. Once, terrifyingly, it was 2091, and I spent three days cataloging everything I saw before I slept again and woke up somewhere closer to home.
I have stopped trying to explain it. I have started keeping notes instead. You are reading them now. If you are reading them now, then at least one version of now exists where I remembered to leave them somewhere findable. That feels like enough.
Tonight I go to sleep not knowing where I will wake up. That used to be the frightening part. Now it is just Tuesday.
