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Tuesday, June 13, at the South Valley Time Loop Support Group

by Heather Kamins

Each time, Jessica begins the meeting the same way. “Well, here we are again.” The same introduction, the same mild chuckles from the group in response. She is the leader of this support group for time loop survivors, a rare experience, yet there are a handful of us in the area. For this, we count our blessings as many of us once counted the days. It isn’t like there are guidebooks for this sort of thing. All we have is each other.

We sit in a circle of chairs in a musty church basement. Toni shares first. She is 58, though age is relative for us. She estimates she was stuck in her loop for several years in total. It was December, and from the way she describes it, she might as well have been Ebenezer Scrooge. “I was working as a manager at this tech company. Eighty-hour weeks and all that. After a while, you just think it’s normal. And I expected the same from the people working under me.” December. The holidays. “It didn’t matter. People wanted to spend time with their families, but I was too brainwashed to see why they should get to do that instead of supporting the company.”

Her loop began when she was crossing the icy street one night to get dinner at a takeout place nearby. “It was probably eight, nine o’clock at night, and I was going to head back into the office afterward. The last thing I saw was the car skidding toward me. Then I was waking up to my alarm clock on the Monday morning of that same week.” She went through the classic stages: disbelief, experimentation, depression, genuine change. Her loop, she discovered, was variable in length, each ending with her death. “Sometimes it was an hour. A day. One time I got to a whole week and thought I was in the clear, but then there was the freak thing with the elevator cable, and I was back again.” She looks at her hands, picks at the cuticle on her left index finger. “It hurt every single time.”

It took her those three or four cumulative years’ worth of looping to become the person she needed to be in order to break out. “It was a lot of time to think, though I wasted so much of it at the office in the beginning. When I pulled back, when I used that time to think about my life, my past, why I was doing all this, it finally started to sink in. I quit that job probably fifty times, fifty different ways. But it wasn’t enough. I had to slow down and become more patient with myself, and with everyone around me. I started gardening. I bought seeds, pots, a grow light, and planted them over and over until finally, I stopped expecting anything. They had to germinate in their own time. And that’s when I was able to break free.” She looks to the window, smiles a little. “I still remember how good it felt when spring finally came after being caught in years of December. The sun on my face. I traded in my big, cold penthouse for a little cottage with a yard, and I transplanted those seedlings into the ground. And they grew. Somehow, amazingly, they grew.”

Sometimes, Toni feels herself slipping back to the way she used to be, losing patience, rushing, being overly demanding. And sometimes, she still feels an odd urge to move carelessly through the world, to walk into traffic to reset herself. But when she does, she goes outside and sits among the greenery, reminding herself that the seasons are the only loop there needs to be.

We all nod quietly for a minute, then Abraham goes next. He is 33, wiry and bearded, with tattoos covering both arms. “I was on the other side of it,” he says. “Stuck in my shitty job, getting pushed around by my egomaniac boss. I lived that same day over and over again, and I’ll be honest with you: I barely even noticed at first. Another day, another dollar, but turns out it was same day, same dollar.” For about six months, he got up at 6:30 when his alarm went off each morning, and it didn’t matter whether he went to bed or stayed up all night, whether he stayed home or drove off as fast as he could and kept going, whether he shut off the alarm clock or smashed it against the wall or left it alone. “Whatever was going on when 6:29 rolled around, I was back in bed with that alarm going off at 6:30. And every day, I went back to that same shitty job, drank the same crap coffee, got reamed out by my boss for some silly thing that didn’t matter.”

Until one day, he quit. “I just walked in and went right up to him and said, ‘I can’t keep doing this. I quit.’ Boss reamed me out for that, too, but it didn’t matter. I was done.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “Can’t believe it took me that long to be done, but I finally was. And that was it. So simple. Next day, I woke up, and it was a brand new day.”

These days, he has a different job. He’s been through several. “Gotta pay the bills somehow,” he says. What he wants is to be a musician, but it’s hard for him to practice. It’s hard for him to do anything requiring repetition. “It freaks me out too much, like I might be falling back into a loop again. Even little things do it sometimes, like if I’m driving down the same road a couple days in a row and the same song comes on.” It’s why he has trouble staying in relationships, in jobs. “It was pretty easy to break out of my loop compared to what some other people go through,” he says. “But sometimes I wonder if I’m not just stuck a different way now.”

Everyone is quiet for a longer time after he finishes. Jessica is the one to break the silence. “Who else would like to share?” A moment passes, then another.

Then Penny speaks up. “I’ll go.” She glances at the man next to her, who gives a little nod. Dave. “We’ll go,” she says, correcting herself.

Penny, age 23, and Dave, 25, are the rarest of the rare: two people who were stuck in a time loop together. “It was our first date,” he says.

“It was fine,” she says. “Average. We went out to dinner, then he walked me home. Then he left, and then I walked to my actual home because, what, I’m going to tell some random guy my real address on the first date? I don’t think so.”

He rolls his eyes a little, like he’s heard this story a hundred times before, and perhaps he has. “Well, I thought it was pretty good. And I suggested,” he says pointedly, “that we stop by this little bar I knew, kind of a speakeasy vibe, for a cocktail. But she didn’t want to, so we skipped it. Anyway, I grabbed a beer at a little neighborhood place near me, then I went home and went right to sleep, probably around 1 a.m. at that point.”

“Meanwhile,” says Penny, “I was lying in bed but I couldn’t fall asleep.” She says it with a hint of irritation, like Dave stole the sleep she was supposed to get. “I don’t remember dozing off, but then it was morning. I didn’t realize until a little later that it was the same morning again, the day of our date. I wasn’t sure what else to do, so I went on the date again.”
“She was going to ghost me,” interjects Dave.

She sighs and shakes her head, as if to say she doesn’t know why he’s being so dramatic. They have an odd rapport, these two, a love-hate push-pull sort of thing, where they often seem irritated with each other yet are unable to let go. They’ve split up and gotten back together numerous times since they broke the loop. They’ve tried dating other people, but how do you find someone who understands you after going through such a thing?

“I was sitting there trying to figure out what to say,” she says. “I was trying to figure out what the loop was about. It didn’t even occur to me he might be stuck, too.”

“She was being really weird. It was super obvious. Like, looking at the same menu item she got the first time around—”
“The seafood risotto,” they say in unison.

“—but she kept waffling about it. Like, do you really think you set off a time loop by ordering a seafood freaking risotto?”

From across the circle, Jessica clears her throat, and this seems to temper the bickering.

“Anyway,” he continues, “I said, ‘It’s happening to you, too, isn’t it?’”

“I knew he knew,” she says, “but I had to be totally sure. So I said, ‘Maybe? What is this?’ And then he said it: a time loop. And we both knew.”

They repeated the same day for two or three months in total. After a few dates, they started getting together earlier in the day to try and figure out how to break free. In the process, they essentially had a months-long relationship, going out to different places, sleeping together, sometimes just hanging out and watching TV. They got to know each other. “It wasn’t a perfect relationship,” says Dave, “but it was nice not to be alone going through that.” There is a fondness to his voice.

“Maybe that’s why our loop was shorter than a lot of people’s,” says Penny. “There were two of us to figure things out.” She is quiet. We are all quiet for a minute, most of us wishing we, too, had such a companion.

Eventually, they discovered that they were meant to be together on that day, in that place, to rescue a baby who’d been abandoned in an alley. “It was on the way to that speakeasy I’d first suggested going to,” he says. “We could have avoided the whole thing. But I get it,” he is quick to add. “She didn’t want to walk down some dark alley with a total stranger.”

“But by this point, you weren’t a stranger anymore,” she acknowledges. “We figured if we retraced our steps from that first date, maybe we’d figure it out. And we did.”

“It took both of us to save her,” says Dave. “I was the one who suggested going that way, but Penny’s the one who heard her whimpering.”

“And Dave found her. She was in a box, just… the tiniest little thing.”

They look at each other now, remembering how monumental it was, this thing they did together.

“We stayed together that night,” he says. “We didn’t do anything physical; I think we just needed not to be alone.”

Some of us wonder who that baby will grow up to be. Someone important, maybe. But aren’t we all important? Don’t we all matter? Are we, the ones sitting here, important in some special way, that this strange thing has happened to us?

At this moment, a young man, probably 20 years old, rushes into the room. “Is this the time loop thing?” he calls out. “You guys have got to help me! I’m stuck in a loop!”

It’s hard to tell if he’s being serious or not. His eyes dart around in panic, but it’s unclear whether he’s putting on an act or is actually serious. Maybe he’s high. Maybe he’s high and stuck in a loop, which seems rough. But most likely he’s full of it.

He doesn’t sit down. He darts around, looking everyone over. “This is the thousandth time I’ve been to this meeting!” he says.

“What’s my name?” says Dave.

But the guy ignores him. “Please! Help me!”

“What is it you need?” asks Jessica.

But he ignores her, too.

Abraham crosses his arms. “Prove you’re stuck in a loop.”

Finally, the guy responds. “How am I supposed to do that?”

“Tell us something you learned last time you were here,” says Abraham. “Something you couldn’t know otherwise.”

But the guy can’t answer. He runs up to Abraham and says, “Come on, man, you just have to believe me!” His eyes are wild, manic.

Abraham rises to his feet, arms still crossed. He’s not big, but he’s strong. We’ve all seen him move furniture around like it’s nothing while setting up for the meeting. The guy clocks Abraham’s not-screwing-around energy and bolts for the door, pausing before he runs out to turn and yell, “Help meeeee!” before disappearing into the night.

Abraham sits back down, and we all wait a minute to make sure the guy is really gone. “Where were we?” asks Jessica. “Penny and Dave?”

“We’re done,” says Penny, though some of us make skeptical faces about this statement.

“I’ll go,” says Sage. Sage is slim and quiet, a little goth, a little bookish, with straight black hair that brushes the tops of their shoulders. They don’t get too deep into the specifics of their story, only that they were caught in the loop for around 10 years, and they don’t know what changed in order to break free. “It haunts me,” they say. “Not knowing. The same day over and over for a decade, and then it just stopped.”

They talk about the things they know about the people they know: family members, friends, coworkers. “Some of those things I learned, it wasn’t through… appropriate means. I wasn’t really somebody to snoop through someone else’s emails or text messages or anything before, but I became so desperate for information. To find a way out. I’d hide near where I knew someone was going to be so I could eavesdrop. Things like that.” They shake their head. “Some of those things you can’t un-know. Like what people really think of you. Things they’ve done. Things they’ve said.” They look down at their shoes. “There are ties I ended up cutting, and they may never know why. I just couldn’t look them in the eye anymore.”

Sage hugs their arms across their midsection. “After that long in the loop, I got used to things being the same. Same day, same weather, things always happening at the same time. Absolute consistency. I hated it, but I got so used to it that it’s been hard to break free.” They feel unsafe, they tell us, without a strict routine. They come to this meeting every single week. They have a sort of uniform they wear every day: jeans, a black T-shirt, a long and loose black cardigan, a silver and amber pendant, four chunky silver rings. “I’m not in the loop anymore, but I don’t know if I’m truly free. I don’t know if I ever will be.”

There is a long, quiet moment before Jessica speaks again. “Would anyone else like to share?” She looks around the room: at Angelina, at Derek, at Tom. No one else wants to speak today. So Jessica closes the meeting. We stand, we hold hands, we say the Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. But what is the difference when the very nature of time doesn’t follow the rules? When the universe changes the things it is not supposed to be able to? What is breaking out of a loop if not defying time itself, changing things that should be out of our control?

After the meeting, we emerge from the basement and disperse like dandelion seeds from the side door of the church. Jessica waves to us and walks down the street by herself. She doesn’t talk much about her own story, though we’ve learned it in bits and pieces by now. She is 42. Her loop ended about five years ago in normal time. She was stuck in it for hundreds of years, she calculates, and has no idea how a person could still be alive after all that time. And imagine that: going through a loop for centuries, then finally getting out. Imagine living the same day over for hundreds of years, yet only having a few decades of life left afterward to figure out what it all meant. What a strange thing time is. What could it possibly want from us?

A few of us go across the street to sit in a cozy café and talk more about our stories and our lives. We stay for another hour or so, sipping cappuccinos and herbal teas, talking, laughing, sympathizing. We leave just before 9 p.m. when the café closes, and the sky still carries light in it this far north, this close to the summer solstice. The air is warm and smells of roses and peonies. A slight breeze brushes past us, making us feel alive in our bodies. We stay for a few minutes on the sidewalk as the café doors are locked, and then we say goodnight. Penny and Dave walk away. Abraham walks away. Sage, Angelina.

I watch them go.

I didn’t talk about my loop in the meeting, or in the café. I didn’t tell them that after I fall asleep tonight, I will wake up this same morning, Tuesday, June 13, and do it all again. That I am, in fact, not a time loop survivor, but am still caught in one. That I have been for so long it makes Jessica’s hundreds of years look like a blink. Thousands of years, I think, maybe tens of thousands. At this point, I have to admit I’ve lost count.

I don’t come to the group every day, listening to the same people tell the same stories, but I do come frequently. When I first learned about it, after ten or twenty years of Tuesdays, I thought this was it, the answer I’d been looking for. Surely these people could help me figure out what was happening to me, and more importantly, how to break free. But I tried all the things that had worked for them, and none of them worked for me. I tried everything I could think of. I tried changing: being good, bad, generous, selfish, dedicated to this or that or any cause I could think of. I did good deeds; I searched for opportunities. I drove my car as far as I could go, traveled by bus, train, airplane even, got some real distance between myself and this town. But when I fell asleep, finally, inevitably, I woke up back in my own bed. Since my loop was from the time I woke to the time I went to sleep, I thought maybe I could take just enough sleeping pills to be unconscious for the whole day and maybe that would reset me, but that didn’t work, either. I tried death as an escape hatch, eventually. But like Toni, I only reset each time I tried. And like her, I felt the agony of it every time.

After a while, I stopped trying to change, to break free. Maybe that was the answer. If I couldn’t get out, maybe I could at least live some kind of life. Perhaps I’m like Sage, who doesn’t know what got them free, and someday I’ll wake up on June 14 without knowing why or how. Or maybe this loop is infinite, and I’ll be in it forever. That’s my working theory at the moment. But anything is possible.

At this point, I’ve done everything I can think to do. I learned every musical instrument I could get my hands on; read every book in the library and bookstore; rifled through every house in town (and was beaten, shot, stabbed a few times doing it); tried every food on every menu within range of here; watched every television show and movie on the air, streaming, in theaters, on DVD. I’ve come up with fan fiction about all the current shows I like since I may never get to see how they end. I have built up and torn down. Lately, I find myself wondering if the human mind is as infinite as time. Now and then, I still find new things to do, but will I eventually run out of options? Will that end the loop? Who will I be, then, if then ever comes? The person I was before the loop began is so far behind me as to seem like one of the historical figures I learned about in elementary school (ah, elementary school), more tethered to legend than reality.

I am grateful for the support group. I came first to find answers, then for companionship, then routine, then a familiar touchpoint as my sense of the totality of my life grows more and more abstract. Perhaps all I have—all I am—is this moment. It’s nice not to be completely alone in that. Now, I know these people as well as I’ve ever known just about anyone. All their secrets. I’ve slept with many of them: Abraham, Derek, Penny and Dave (separately and together), Sage, Jessica. To them, it’s a one-night stand, but I’ve taken all the time in the world to get to know them. All the time in the world and then some. I’ve even followed the support group interrupter out of the meeting and gotten to know him. Luke. He’s not one of us, of course, except in the sense that he, too, is lonely. Sometimes I share my story with these people (what does it matter when they won’t remember it?), and they’ve tried to help. But now, sensing that this is infinity, I usually don’t. I would rather simply be with them, walking along the road, looking up at the stars, feeling the warmth of their bodies when I need to. If all I have is this moment, let me be fully in it.

I am grateful, too, for the warmth of the air on this day, how the breeze smells of flowers. The clear sky with a view of the stars and the perpetual crescent moon. The way my body, age 40 (plus some thousand) can move and stretch and sense the world around me. I have the means to do things; I haven’t been to work in ages, yet my bank account never runs out of money. This day contains joy and pleasure—it isn’t pure suffering. Maybe it’s heaven. It could also be hell, but I suspect it’s neither, but something else entirely.

The others have walked away. I leave my spot in front of the café and walk toward my car, parked in the perfect spot I always know will be waiting for me just down the block. Windows down and radio up, I turn the dial just in time to catch a song I love, singing along as the fragrant air courses across my skin. I go home and light the lavender-scented candle I once saved for a special occasion, and I eat the rest of the ice cream in the freezer, knowing that both will be replenished in the morning. I touch the bruise on my thigh, tender and purple where I banged into a coffee table a few days—a few thousand years—ago, the light ache of it reminding me I’m alive. Or whatever this is. It’s close enough, isn’t it? Is it any different from life? The sensory input of it, the way we fall into our familiar habits, the way memory twists and warps over time no matter how much time we have. The way that people could change, but usually don’t.

I lie in bed, resting against my best linens, the blanket made by my grandmother’s hands, and I let myself drift into sleep. Maybe tomorrow, another today, whatever it is, I will go to the group again, or to the beach, or maybe I will stay home and watch movies or read. Maybe I will talk to a stranger, if I can find one. Maybe I will think of something I’ve never thought to do before, or maybe I will do it all again. To accept the things we cannot change. I listen to the cycle of my own breath. I am here. I am now.

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Host Commentary

About this story, the author says: “I love all kinds of time loop stories! Since they often end with the character breaking out, I found myself wondering what effect it would have on a person to be stuck in a loop for days, months, years, or even longer, and then, after adjusting to that reality, go back to regular life. It strikes me as similar to the process of moving on after a loss, illness, or other traumatic event, and how alienating that can sometimes feel. I gave these characters a support group so they could compare notes and feel less alone as they figured out how to move through the world again.”

Time Loop stories can be frightening, or maddening, when you think of everything a person lives through only to start it again. But what I love about them is they let the character explore anything and everything about their lives and their day that they may not have normally done. The most frustrating thing, as our protagonist experiences, is not knowing what to do in order to get out of the time loop itself.

In season one of Russian Doll, the characters had to stop each other from doing something self-destructive. In the surprisingly good TV Christmas romance, 12 Dates of Christmas, the protagonist had to discover everyone around her who needed help and help them (although that seems like it could be eternal, and I’m still not sure how she managed it in that final afternoon, but whatever, Christmas plot magic!) One of my favorite episodes of The Librarians forces the most selfish member of the gang, the thief Ezekiel, to pay attention and learn what he can from his teammates to finish the video game level they find themselves in. It seems like many of these time loop stories boil down to “be better.”

But in this story it seems that the protagonist must simply accept the life they have. We don’t know this for sure, since the story has an ambiguous ending. At Escape Pod we try to bring you stories with humor, or fun, or at the very least, a sense of hope. And this story was interesting because you can take either hope or despair from the ending. Will acceptance bring peace? Will it end the time loop? Or is it just giving up?

The Worldcon will be happening in Chengdu, China in two weeks, and while we didn’t send anyone from our team, we hope that everyone attending has a safe and fun time. We will be up early watching the Hugos! Good luck to all the nominees.

And our closing quotation (slightly paraphrased) this week comes from The Librarians’ Ezekiel Jones:

Lost count the amount of times you’ve told me that story, but I like the way you look at me when you tell it.

Thanks for joining us, and stay safe, stay kind.