The first time it happened, Claire was making breakfast.
She cracked an egg into the pan, and the memory dissolved. Not the egg—that was still there, sizzling. But the moment before. The reaching for the carton, the weight of the egg in her hand, the decision to make breakfast at all. Gone.
She stood at the stove, spatula in hand, bewildered. Why was she cooking? Had she even been hungry?
It happened again that afternoon. She was mid-sentence with her sister on the phone when the words evaporated. She heard herself talking but couldn't recall what she'd been saying. Her sister's reply made no sense.
Claire? You still there?
I... what were we talking about?
A pause. Your vacation plans. Are you okay?
Claire had no memory of mentioning a vacation.
The gaps grew wider. Conversations she couldn't recall having. Emails she'd apparently sent. Entire hours that vanished as she lived them, leaving only confused aftermath.
She started writing everything down. Notes on her phone, sticky reminders everywhere. But even as she wrote, the moment of writing would slip away. She'd find notes in her own handwriting that she had no memory of creating.
You're losing time, one note said.
No, she wrote back. I'm living in borrowed moments.
But who was lending them? And what happened when they were called back?
Claire stood in her kitchen one evening, surrounded by notes she didn't remember writing, and felt the present moment start to fade. She was still there—breathing, standing, existing. But the experience of being there dissolved like sugar in water.
She tried to hold on. Tried to grip the feeling of her feet on the floor, the hum of the refrigerator, the weight of the pen in her hand.
It slipped away.
And then she was standing in her kitchen, pen in hand, with no idea why.
There was a note in front of her. Fresh ink. Her handwriting.
I was here. I promise, I was here.
Claire picked up the pen and added one more line:
I am here. Right now. Even if I won't remember.
Then the moment faded, and all that remained was the evidence that someone had been there.
Someone who looked like her. Wrote like her. Lived in her body.
Someone she'd never meet.
Because by the time she read the note, that person would already be gone.