The street corner was familiar, but the purpose for being there had already gone.
Mia stood beneath a flickering walk sign, her journal half-open, pen uncapped in her right hand, eyes blank. A passing bus hissed to a stop two yards away. She didn't flinch.
She had stopped walking fifteen minutes ago.
Or maybe twenty.
She checked her watch.
The time made sense.
The day did not.
She scrawled a line across the page:
Location: Maple & Third. Intent: Unknown. Memory failure confirmed.
A gust of wind lifted the corner of a torn flyer beside her foot. Mia's gaze snapped to it. Bright yellow, something about a piano lesson. It didn't matter. She knelt, picked it up, flipped it over, stared at the back like it might answer her.
Nothing.
She stuffed it into her coat pocket anyway.
She flipped back through the journal.
Page after page, carefully dated, mapped, cross-referenced.
Then a blank one.
No.
Not blank.
The ink had faded.
Yesterday's entry, or what should have been, had dissolved into faint gray trails like veins beneath wax.
Mia's chest tightened.
She pressed the pen hard to the page.
New classification: Memory Blur Level 3. Onset: Ambient. Stability: Unreliable.
Symptoms: Time drift. Functional pause. Purpose loss. Ink degradation.
She drew a box around it.
Then shaded the box.
Then underlined it.
The bus hissed again and pulled away. A honk startled her. She blinked up.
The light had changed. A car idled, its driver watching her.
She moved off the curb mechanically, her feet unsure at first, as if needing to re-remember the act of walking.
Across the street, the corner store's display window glowed with old advertisements: a dusty soda cutout, a baseball poster faded to orange. She stared at the baseball player's face.
Familiar.
Not personally. Just era-familiar. Like the gum flavor in summer. Like ice trays you had to crack by hand.
She wrote:
Temporal Detachment: High. Object recognition intact. Personal relevance unclear.
Countermeasure Attempt: Anchor through object listing.
She turned the page and began writing objects.
Payphone with missing cord. Grocery bag with red onions. Sarah's jacket: denim with iron-on stars. Yellow flyer: piano, maybe. Crosswalk button: scratched with a name—SAM. Ice cream sign with prices too low. Her own hands: trembling.
The fifth one started to smudge. Then the sixth. The ink blurred as if soaked in light.
Mia set her pen down.
The fear hadn't crept up this time. It had marched.
She sat on the bench outside the store.
The metal was cold. Beneath her, the slats creaked with the slow shift of weight. She traced her fingertip over the grooves in the wood behind her, trying to create a new entry through sensation. A new connection.
She opened the journal to a page from last week. Something solid. A known date. A meal. She found it:
Lunch: Tuna sandwich. Diner. Booth 3. Sat behind Sarah and Linda. Recorded laughter pattern.
She breathed.
That had happened.
That had been hers.
She wrote below it:
Preserved entry: Still mine. Level 1 certified.
But the fear lingered. A brittle, invisible line. What if this, too, would vanish? What if it had already, and she'd reinserted it from guesswork?
Across the street, a child ran by with a balloon. The string caught briefly on the mailbox before snapping loose again.
The balloon was red.
Mia blinked.
No, it was yellow.
Or had been.
She turned a page.
An entry had been overwritten.
Not crossed out. Not erased.
Written over.
And not in her handwriting.
Her stomach twisted.
The lines were tight, unfamiliar loops, still blue ink, but slightly darker. Heavier.
She didn't read the words at first. Just stared.
Then:
I told you we'd be here again.
That was all.
Mia closed the journal.
Her hands were shaking.
She stood.
Walked to the end of the block.
Every building looked slightly too still. As if holding breath. As if waiting.
She leaned against a streetlamp and reopened the journal. Her entry was still there—but fainter.
She wrote:
Entry corrupted. Memory uncertain. Surveillance suggested. Pattern breach logged.
She paused, then added:
Possibility: External authorship. Time responding with inserted feedback.
The light changed again.
She didn't cross.
She sat on the curb and watched as the rest of the day continued without her.
The sky had dimmed. She hadn't noticed when it started.
Mia looked down at her palms.
Still hers. But maybe not.
In the fading light, she whispered:
"Anchor."
And hoped that saying it aloud would make it true.