(AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN…) ALL I KNOW IS PAIN III

The sad reality about life was that it was indifferent to our pleas, our desires, and our hopes. It didn’t matter whether we wanted something or not, or even whether it was good or bad for us. What would happen would happen. There was no denying life; as much as people might rage and scream about deciding their own fate, it was only a fool’s dream. You were only ever working within the millions of possibilities that existed.

Taylor was forced, with every loop that passed, to realise that. She didn’t want to watch her dad die, but regardless of her wishes, regardless of everything, he would still die. He would die and die and die and die and die and die and—

Taylor found herself staring up at the sky, watching the clouds pass by lazily.

The sunlight was warm against her face. A breeze moved across her skin, carrying the smell of something she couldn’t identify in the air. She could hear voices nearby, but they seemed to come from a considerable distance away despite the fact that she could see the people standing around her.

Her dad’s face peered down at hers.

Taylor watched his mouth move as he said something, following the shape of each word without understanding any of them. His face was hazy, as if she had forgotten what he looked like, despite constantly seeing him. And she could make out his hair and the outline of his nose, the familiar color of his eyes, yet whenever she tried to hold the image in her mind, it seemed to slip away.

Around him were others, strangers with faces she also couldn’t make out. She could see the clothes they wore and the way they moved, someone’s hand resting against their knee and another person’s jacket shifting in the breeze, but whenever she looked at their faces, there was nothing for her to hold onto. 

Her dad reached toward her, and Taylor watched his hand come closer.

What was she—

She found herself leaning against a wall.

The brick was rough against her back, and the edge of something dug into her shoulder. She could feel the warmth of the sun on one side of her face and the chill of the wall on the other. There were voices nearby again, though they were different voices this time, or maybe they weren’t. Someone was crying. Someone was shouting. A siren passed somewhere beyond the buildings, its sound rising before fading into the distance.

Taylor looked down at her hands. There were splotches of blood across them, dark and wet against her skin, and she knew it couldn’t have come from her. She stared at it for a moment, watching the blood gather in the lines of her palms. Something dark had caught beneath one of her fingernails, and when she rubbed at it with her thumb, the stain only spread farther across her skin.

Then she blinked.

The blood was gone.

Taylor lowered her hands and found herself standing in an alley.

Why was she in an alley?

Her footsteps stilled, the sudden screams that appeared muted as she stared down at her feet. The pavement was cracked beneath her shoes, with a small puddle of red growing beside the wall. She could see her reflection in it, distorted by the ripples spreading across the surface.

Then, for some reason, she couldn’t tell which way she was facing. Up was down, down was up, left was right, right was left—

Taylor turned her head, and the alley seemed to stretch farther than it had a moment before, the walls drawing away until she could no longer tell where they ended.

She found herself leaning against someone, someone distantly familiar whose presence enveloped her in a muted sense of comfort. Words reached her ears, unintelligible but filled with a warmth she couldn’t deny, and Taylor remained where she was, letting herself sink into it.

Then a force slammed into her, pressures from unseen angles utterly pulverising everything that made her, her.

There was no single point of pain. It came from everywhere at once, crushing through her body until she could no longer tell where her limbs were. Her chest compressed. Something broke. There was pressure against her skull, against her spine, against every part of her until the sensation became too large to understand.

She was walking again, the ground passing beneath her feet. She could hear people talking as she moved, though none of the words stayed with her. She passed a window and saw herself reflected in the glass, then turned her head and found a wall where the window should have been. But her feet kept carrying her forward.

She stopped.

Someone moved past her.

She started walking again.

She stopped.

She was somewhere else.

She walked again, then stopped, then walked, then stopped, then walked, then stopped, then walked again, and each time she stopped there seemed to be something different around her. A street. An alley. A wall. Her dad. Someone she didn’t know. Someone she thought she knew. A hand reaching for hers. A gun levelled at her. A knife—

Someone was screaming her name.

Taylor heard the sound and kept walking, the voice fading behind her before rising again, closer this time. She stopped.

Someone was screaming and screaming and screaming and screaming and screaming and—

Oh.

She was the one.

Taylor was the one screaming.