19: only one of us kept it

Short one. I don't have a long one in me. I've been awake since Friday.

Corridor, four doors, crack seven to one, day nineteen of the new crack. Thirty-seven photos. I've started to think of the first eighteen as the old clock and the rest as the clock, the way you'd think of somebody's hair before and after. The way I've apparently never thought of anybody's hair.

The store's still perfect. The claw clip's still in the back, I assume, I haven't gone. Fifth note in my file for something I don't remember doing. My manager showed me the write-up and my initials were on it and it said I'd been found in the back at 2:10 on Friday and I wasn't in the back on Friday, I was on the floor all day, I know I was, and I signed it anyway because what do you say. You knew that.

The bus stop. I've been going at 5:15 like always, and I haven't been looking at the bench, that's been my deal with myself, I look at the signal and I get on the bus. Today the 14 was late, and I was standing there, and I felt it.

Not the ping pong.

I looked over and it was him. Same coat, too heavy, it's the middle of May. Sitting on the bench in the shelter. Pharmacy bag in his lap, the white one, and his eyes were on my hands.

The held look. From the stranger. From the person who said you saw it too like they'd been carrying it for years, whose eyes I watched go smooth a month ago on that same bench, who looked at their phone while the countdown went in order. His eyes weren't smooth today. They were on me. Steady, on my hands, and up to my face, and down to my hands again when I moved them, reading, and when I met it, it didn't break. It just sat there in the shelter, in the coat, with the bag, and looked.

I didn't go over. I want that on the record. On April 1st I would've gone over. On April 14th I did go over, and sat down, and watched somebody forget me. Today I stood at the curb for four minutes with a stranger looking at my hands and I didn't move, and when the 14 came I got on it, and I went to the back, and I didn't look out the window.

Here's what I figured out on the bus, and I think it's the truest thing I've written and I don't feel anything about it, which is how I know.

We met before a re-render. That's all it was. There was a version of that bus stop where two people with sticky eyes stood at a curb and one of them said you saw it too, and then it got fixed. Rolled back, run clean. And when the scene got run again, they were in it, on the bench, with the bag, and they went along with it, the way everybody goes along with it, the way the kid and the song and the dented box did. And I didn't. I'd already felt the minute go by.

That's the Mandela Effect. That's what it is when it's not a logo. It's two people who were both in a room, and the room got voted on, and only one of them kept it.

And the one who kept it is the mistake. I keep saying that. I'm going to keep saying it until it stops being true or I stop.

Marisol kept it for a day. Two weeks. However long it was between the size run and Tuesday. Then she'd always had cancer. The stranger kept it for a week, then they'd never seen a countdown out of order. And now they're on a bench looking at my hands like Deb does, like the woman at fixture 14, like whatever the noticing turns into after it gets fixed. It doesn't go smooth and stay smooth. It goes smooth and then something else moves in.

I've been carrying it since March. I'd like to know what I've been carrying it toward.

Kate and I had dinner tonight, actual dinner, she cooked, she's been cooking more since Marisol, and we sat at the table, and she was telling a story. To me. About me. Somebody at her firm is looking for a roommate and she was saying she'd tell them how we found each other, "because it was so random, remember," and she told it.

She said she came into the store. Two years ago. She said she was looking for a coat, a green one, for an interview, and she couldn't find her size, and I walked up and found it on a different rack, the wrong rack, and she said "you were so intense about it, you said somebody had hung it in the wrong place and you looked personally offended," and she laughed, and she said we got to talking and I mentioned I was looking for a place and she had a room. "The coat," she said. "You always say it was the coat."

I've never said it was the coat.

I answered a listing. Online, a roommate site, a room in a two-bedroom near the 14 line, and we met at a coffee place on a Saturday and she had a badge on a lanyard from the firm and she asked me three questions and one of them was whether I was on any medication, which I remember because I thought it was a weird question and I answered it anyway. That's how we met. I've never sold her a coat. I've never sold anybody a coat, I'm not on the floor to sell, I dress it.

And I sat there. And she was smiling at me, red hair, the story still in her face, and I did what I've learned to do. I looked away, and I looked back, and it was Kate, telling a nice story about a coat.

I let it go.

I said "yeah, the coat," and she said "the coat!" and got up to get the dessert, and I sat at the table and counted, not seconds, things. The hair. The photo on the fridge. The street on her mail. The coat. Four things about the person I live with that have always been different from what I remember, and every one of them has something that agrees with her, and nothing that agrees with me except this.

She's the most corrected thing in the apartment. I'm not going to say it out loud. I'm saying it here, where it goes.

I let it go because I know what happens to people I say it to. I'm not going to say it to Kate.

Four views.

If the person on the bench reads this, and I don't think they can, I don't think they read anything anymore. You said the bench. You told me to look at the bench. I never told anybody what I saw. I'm still not going to. But I want you to know I remember that you saw it, even if you don't, even if you never did.

Somebody should.