Some people think the worst part of repeating the same day over and over is the monotony. The temporal confinement. The subtle ways you leave no impression. The unmarked pages, the unclipped toenails, the words stuffed back into your mouth as dawn leavens on the next Thursday, which is the same Thursday as yesterday and the day before that.
Maybe its the lives you cannot save, the trains derailed, the flash floods, the freak accidents that rewind and fast forward like a scratched CD while you stand and watch, too insane to make a difference. But no. These things become you. Just as you learn to brush your teeth or tie your shoes, reflexes baked and burned into your body with neural electricity, you learn to ignore. To fade. To cup your hands around that flickering candle of hope, the only thing that seems to diminish and change with the eternal cycle of Thursday, Thursday, Thursday. No. These aren’t the worst parts at all.
The normalcy. That is the worst part.
When one is forced to repeat the same day ad infinitum, one tends to look for a cause, something alien or strange. Maybe it’s a butterfly with three wings. Perhaps it’s the muttering old woman watching the CRT television in the cornerstore who you always suspected to be a witch. Could there be a mark, a sigil, a blood-stained brand tattooed on your back, just out of reach where you can’t see it? But no matter how fervently one looks, there is nothing out of the ordinary.
The same dogs howl at the end of the street, on that rare Thursday when you deign to leave your house. Not a bird or brick out of place. Crows screech the same symphonies you’ve heard since you were a child kicking rocks with your feet on a brisk, autumn day. Even the wind is normal, a bristling touch so casual and light that it sends chills down your back. Everything is just as it should be.
Except, of course, for you.
The only anomaly on an unremarkable day.
Even if you began to describe the feeling to the unaffected, it would be filtered into the familiar, categorized, filed away like a color outside the visible spectrum, automatically perceived as a green, a blue, a red. Something understandable. Recognizeable. A delusion. A lapse. An illness. But never what it really is: a curse, with no cause, no explanation, and no escape.
Then, of course, you begin to speculate. What if there are other anomalies out there? What if others find themselves trapped in the same day over and over, but a different day? Where your prison is Thursday, perhaps it is Saturday for others, or Wednesday or next Tuesday.
You realize, with nauseous clarity, that this wouldn’t matter for you, the one fated to never see Saturday, Wednesday, or next Tuesday. Even if other prisons existed, you would never be able to glimpse them through the bars of your own. Nor would the others be able to hear you no matter how loudly you screamed or how vigorously you threw your body against the wall until you swelled and purpled.
It is Thursday, and the world is deathly quiet.
A chill infests your bones.
Nothing to do.
Except keep screaming.