Larius woke up to the sound of his own breathing.
It wasn't loud or anything.
He just noticed it before he noticed anything else.
In. Out. In. Out.
For a few seconds he didn't move. His eyes stayed closed. The air felt heavy and still, like the room was holding its breath with him.
His head hurt.
Not a sharp pain. More like someone had stuffed cotton into his skull and then pressed down on it slowly.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling above him was off-white with a tiny hairline crack running diagonally toward the corner. He stared at it like it was a new discovery.
He'd seen that crack before.
He knew he had.
But for a second, it still felt unfamiliar.
"Okay," he muttered, voice dry. "This is… home. I think."
He didn't sound convinced.
His bed wasn't big. Just a regular mattress on a simple frame. The sheets were a muted bluish-grey, the kind of color people pick when they don't want to think too much about design but still don't want plain white.
He liked that color.
He couldn't remember when he decided that, but it felt right. The soft blue made his chest feel a little less tight.
His pillowcase didn't match perfectly. It was closer to a pale green. He noticed that too. It bothered him a little, in a distant way, like something that should be fixed someday but not today.
The room around him was small. A narrow dresser in one corner, a tiny desk against the wall, a cheap black office chair on wheels that squeaked when he leaned back in it. There were a few sticky notes on the wall near the desk, curling at the edges.
He could see his handwriting on them from the bed, but not the words.
He didn't want to sit up yet.
His phone sat on the bedside table, screen dark. The table itself was one of those small, flat-pack things. Light wood. Slightly uneven leg. He knew that because sometimes it wobbled when he put a glass of water down too hard.
All of this felt familiar.
But the familiarity felt second-hand.
Like he was recalling someone else's description of the room instead of his own memories.
Eventually he reached for the phone.
His arm felt heavier than it should.
The screen lit up with the usual: time, date, a couple of notifications. The brightness stabbed at his eyes, so he angled it away slightly.
The date made him pause.
He knew the numbers. He knew what they meant. But the feeling he usually had when he saw a date—where it sat on the line of his life, what had happened last week, what was supposed to happen next week—that feeling was missing.
The numbers just looked like numbers.
"Right," he said. "Morning."
He checked a few apps without really processing them. Messages that didn't seem urgent, a couple of emails, some recommendation feeds. His thumb moved automatically.
Then he hit his music app.
Rows of playlists stared back at him. Names like "Study Noise," "Late Night Walk," "Too Tired To Think."
He hesitated, then tapped one of them.
Soft music started playing. Nothing dramatic. Just low, slow, background sound. A piano, maybe. Something that was supposed to make thinking easier.
It didn't.
If anything, it pressed against his skull from the inside.
After a minute he paused it and set the phone back down.
His head pulsed once, twice.
"Too early," he muttered.
He wasn't sure if he meant the time, the music, or the day itself.
He sat up.
It felt like trying to move through thick air. His body obeyed, but there was a tiny delay between intention and action.
His feet touched the floor. The laminated wood was cool under his skin. That felt normal. Normal was good. He held onto that for a second.
The room looked different from this angle, even though it was the same room.
He could see the desk properly now.
A laptop sat in the center, lid closed. To the left, a stack of worn notebooks. To the right, a couple of books: Introduction to Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, and a thin spiral-bound thing with "Research Methods" on the cover.
The sight tugged at something in his chest.
"College," he said under his breath. "Right. I did that."
Community college. Psychology. He remembered that much.
He remembered half-paying attention during lectures on cognitive biases and memory. The irony did not escape him now, but he was too tired to actually laugh.
He blinked.
The room blurred for a moment, then sharpened again.
He realized he had no idea what day of the week it was supposed to be for him. Not the calendar. Him.
What had he done yesterday?
He frowned, trying to trace it back.
There were fragments.
Sitting at the desk, maybe. Reading something. Searching something on the internet. A thumbnail in his recommended videos list—some show with a guy in a police uniform. LAPD.
That word felt important.
He pushed harder on that thought.
His head answered with a dull spike of pain.
He inhaled sharply and let it go.
"Okay. Not that," he said. "Not yet."
The apartment was quiet when he finally stood up.
There wasn't much to walk around. From the bedroom corner you could see most of it: a small open space that was trying very hard to be a living room, a tiny kitchen tucked along one wall, a narrow hallway leading to the bathroom.
The walls were painted a soft, faded beige. Not his choice, probably. Just what the place came with. But he'd added a few things.
A cheap rug in a dark blue-grey that almost matched his bedsheets.
A mug on the counter with a cartoon brain printed on it and the words "THINKING… PLEASE WAIT."
A second-hand floor lamp with a warm, slightly yellow light he liked more than the cold white ceiling light.
He noticed all of these as he moved.
He didn't remember buying all of them. Maybe one or two. But they felt like things he would have picked.
That was something.
He touched the back of the chair as he passed the desk, fingers brushing the worn fabric. It felt rough under his skin, familiar in the way of things you use without thinking about them too often.
He opened the laptop without really planning to.
The screen lit up, password prompt waiting.
His fingers found the keys and typed before he consciously remembered the pattern.
When the desktop appeared, he exhaled slowly in relief.
It was a small thing, but it meant some part of him remembered something correctly.
Folders cluttered the screen. "Notes," "Class Stuff," "Job Search," "Random," "To Read Later." A dozen tabs would probably be open if he checked the browser.
He didn't.
Not yet.
Instead, he closed the lid again.
The idea of the internet pressed at his skull like the music did.
He made coffee.
The process was mechanical: fill the kettle, scoop the grounds, wait for the water to boil. The tiny kitchen was narrow enough that he could stand in the middle and reach almost everything without moving his feet.
He liked the mug with the cartoon brain. He used it without thinking about using it.
Steam rose as he poured.
The smell hit him and for a second the heaviness in his head eased a little. Coffee smelled like routine. Like mornings that had happened before and would happen again.
He leaned against the counter and took a careful sip.
Too hot. He winced and waited.
While it cooled, he let his eyes move over the room again.
There were details he hadn't really looked at before. Tiny paint chips near the floor. A faint smudge where a piece of furniture had scraped the wall long ago. The way the light from the single small window turned the beige into a more golden color near noon.
He realized he knew that—the noon part—even though he hadn't checked the time.
Had he spent that much time staring at walls before?
He didn't think so.
He couldn't be sure.
He took his coffee to the small table by the window.
The table was barely big enough for two chairs and a laptop. One chair was pushed in; the other faced the window like someone had sat there and watched the world outside more than once.
He sat in that chair.
Outside, the view wasn't spectacular. Another building across the narrow street, some balconies, some laundry left out, a few cars parked below. But there was sky above the roofline, a slice of blue that seemed a little too bright.
He watched nothing in particular for a while.
His thoughts didn't exactly race. They drifted. Pulled in one direction, then another, never really landing.
He took another careful sip of coffee.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Let's… try to be systematic."
It sounded like something a past version of him would have said.
He tried to imagine that version. The one who studied psychology, who took notes on behavior and cognition, who probably thought he understood how the mind worked at least a little.
Right now, his own mind felt like an unfamiliar room with the lights turned off.
Still, the training was there.
He put the mug down and pressed his palms together.
"Orientation," he said. "Time, place, person."
It was something he'd read in a textbook once. Basic mental status check.
"Time…" He glanced at the clock on the microwave. "Okay. I know the number. I know the date. It just doesn't feel connected to… anything. But I can say it. So that's something."
"Place." He looked around. "Apartment. My apartment. Somewhere in the city. I know the name but it's… fuzzy." He paused. "United States. That part I'm pretty sure of."
"Person," he said last, quieter. "Name's Larius Wilarrow. That I remember."
He waited to see if saying it would make him feel more solid.
It didn't.
But it didn't make things worse either.
He thought of the previous day again.
Or what he thought was the previous day.
The memory of the street, the bench, the feeling of one step not connecting—those were sharp. Too sharp. They didn't blend well with everything else in his head.
Before that?
He squinted, trying to reach further back.
There was a desk. A different one. A different room. A different screen. Warmer air. A ceiling fan. His fingers on a keyboard. A window with a view that wasn't this one. The light felt different. The sounds outside felt different.
He saw a glimpse of a web page. Something about a TV show. A man in a police uniform. LAPD. The word "rookie" somewhere in the text.
His brain tightened around that.
"Careful," he whispered to himself.
He pushed just a little harder.
Trying to remember the name.
John… something.
The pain hit him like someone pushing a thumb into the softest part of his brain.
He hissed and grabbed the edge of the table.
It wasn't the worst pain in the world, but it was wrong. It felt like the headache wasn't trying to punish him, exactly, but to push him away from something.
His vision blurred at the edges.
He let the memory go.
The pain faded slowly, leaving a dull, tired ache behind.
He sat there for a long minute, breathing and staring at the half-empty mug.
"Okay," he said eventually, voice hoarse. "So that's off-limits."
He had no idea why.
He only knew that every time he tried to connect certain dots, his brain fought back.
He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes.
It wasn't restful.
Images slid past behind his eyelids. His current apartment. The other room. A crowd of people in a place that might have been a campus. A hallway that smelled like cleaning fluid and old paper.
He saw a whiteboard with words like "cognitive dissonance" and "schema" written on it. He remembered half-listening as a professor talked about how people fit new information into old patterns, even when it didn't quite fit.
He opened his eyes again.
"That's funny," he muttered. "In a not-funny way."
He took another drink of coffee. It had cooled enough to swallow comfortably now. The warmth moved down his throat and settled in his stomach, a small anchor inside all the fuzziness.
He needed something simple to do.
Something that didn't involve chasing memories.
His gaze drifted toward the laptop again.
This time, when he opened it, he didn't stop at the desktop.
He clicked on the browser.
Tabs bloomed across the top of the screen like petals. Half-finished searches, articles he'd meant to read, old notes. Nothing jumped out as important right away.
He clicked on the search bar.
His fingers hovered over the keys for a long time.
What was he supposed to look up?
"You're being dramatic," he told himself, trying to force a small smile. "It's just Google."
He typed slowly.
"First aid for headache."
The suggested results popped up instantly.
He scrolled.
Hydration. Rest. Over-the-counter painkillers. Check for other symptoms. Seek medical help if severe or persistent.
None of this was new information.
But reading it made the ache in his head throb again, like it was reacting to being talked about.
He tried another search.
"Sudden headache with memory problems."
More serious results this time. Warnings. Medical articles. Scary words here and there. Stroke. Tumor. Neurological.
A cold, thin line of fear slid down his spine.
He stared at the screen.
"Okay, that's not helpful," he said, shutting the tab a little too fast.
His brain had started supplying possibilities, scenarios, worst-case images. He cut them off before they could get detailed.
He knew, academically, what catastrophizing looked like.
He also knew that knowing what it was didn't stop it from happening.
He sat back, rubbing his temples with his fingers.
The idea of taking medication crossed his mind. Painkillers, maybe. Something to dull this.
But as soon as he imagined swallowing a pill, his chest tightened.
A quiet, wordless alarm went off inside his head.
Not a voice. Not a command. Just a pressure that said:
Don't.
The feeling was so strong it made his fingers freeze midway to the drawer where he kept random things.
He sat there, hand suspended, for several seconds.
"Why?" he asked the empty room.
No answer, of course.
But the pressure eased when he dropped the idea.
He pulled his hand back and let it rest in his lap.
"Fine," he sighed. "No pills. Got it."
He knew enough about psychology to recognize a few things.
Avoidance. Redirection. Defense mechanisms.
The funny thing was, it didn't feel like he was choosing them.
It felt like some part of his mind, working behind a locked door, was gently steering him away from certain choices.
He didn't know if that was good or bad.
He only knew he couldn't push against it without making the pain worse.
"Okay," he said again, because it was easier than thinking of new words. "So we do something else. Something easy."
He looked around for an easy task.
There were a few dishes in the sink. A shirt hanging over the back of the chair that should probably be folded. A thin layer of dust on the bookshelf.
He stood up and went to the sink.
Washing dishes was simple. Water, soap, scrub, rinse. His body remembered how to do it without needing his full attention.
The clink of ceramic and the sound of running water filled the apartment.
It wasn't much, but it was better than silence.
As he cleaned, he noticed small things.
The sponge was wearing thin in one corner. The dish soap was almost empty. There was a tiny crack along the handle of one mug he hadn't noticed before.
None of these things mattered on their own.
Together, they made the place feel real.
He washed until there was nothing left to clean.
Then he dried his hands on a towel and stood there, unsure what to do with himself again.
Back at the table, his coffee was almost gone.
He picked up the mug and studied the design for a moment. The cartoon brain had a little progress bar under it, half full. The words "THINKING… PLEASE WAIT" were slightly faded from use.
It made him snort quietly.
"Yeah," he murmured. "That tracks."
He sat down and opened the laptop again.
This time, he hesitated only for a moment before typing something else into the search bar.
"Basic first aid steps."
Lists appeared. Check scene safety. Call for help. Check breathing. Stop bleeding. Keep person calm.
He read them carefully.
It wasn't that he planned to use them on anyone else. He just wanted… tools. Something to hold onto. Something that felt like it could be useful if these strange episodes—these headaches, these memory slips—got worse.
He opened another tab.
"Grounding techniques for anxiety."
He knew some of this already from school. Lists of things like: name five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell, one you can taste.
He read them anyway.
He tried one, just to see.
Five things he could see: the mug, the laptop, the curtain, the crack in the ceiling, the psychology textbook on the desk.
Four things he could touch: the chair under him, the edge of the table, the smooth surface of the mug, the rough fabric of his shirt.
Three things he could hear: a distant car outside, a faint hum from the fridge, his own breathing.
Two things he could smell: coffee, soap.
One thing he could taste: the last trace of coffee on his tongue.
By the time he finished, his chest felt a little less tight.
His head still hurt.
But the pain felt… contained.
Not gone. Just less like it was going to swallow him whole.
He exhaled slowly.
"Okay," he said, softer this time. "That's something."
The word LAPD drifted back into his mind.
He didn't ask it to.
It just floated up, like a bubble from deep water.
He stared at the search bar.
His fingers twitched.
He told himself it was just curiosity. Just casual. Just checking.
He typed three letters.
L. A. P.
His head gave a small, warning throb.
He erased them quickly.
The pain eased.
He sat there for a long time, staring at the mostly empty search bar.
"Not yet," he whispered. "Fine. Not yet."
He leaned back in the chair and looked at the ceiling again.
The crack was still there.
He tried to imagine what a normal day would have looked like before all this.
Before the missing step. Before the bench. Before this heavy, quiet apartment that felt like both his and not his at the same time.
Maybe he would have gone out.
Run errands. Looked for work. Studied something. Watched videos. Read web novels.
He thought of the thumbnail again. The one with the cop.
He forced his mind away from it before the headache could return.
"Later," he told himself. "One thing at a time."
He stood up and walked to the bookshelf.
It wasn't big. Three shelves, half full. Psychology texts on one level. Paperbacks on another. A scattering of random titles on the top— novels he'd probably read more than once, judging by the worn spines.
He ran a finger along them.
He didn't pull any out.
Just the act of touching them made him feel something like comfort.
These were all fixed stories. Written. Complete. No missing frames. No blank spaces.
He envied that.
He picked one at random in the end, just to have something to do.
He took it back to the table and opened it.
The words swam a little at first, but eventually settled into lines he could follow.
He read the same page three times before he realized he wasn't actually taking anything in.
His mind kept drifting back to the same questions.
Where had he been before waking up in that street?
How much of his life here was real?
How much of the "before" was real?
And why did his own brain feel like it was under construction, with parts blocked off by invisible tape?
He closed the book with a soft thump.
The sound felt too final.
"Okay," he said again, tired of the word but using it anyway. "New plan."
He didn't know what the plan was.
He only knew he couldn't sit at the table forever.
He looked around the apartment one more time, letting his gaze linger on each object: the lamp, the rug, the mug, the books, the crack in the ceiling.
This was his life now, apparently.
Incomplete, blurry, and half a step out of sync.
He stood up.
He needed air.
The thought wasn't dramatic. It was simple, like needing water or sleep. The apartment walls felt a little too close, like they had leaned in an inch while he wasn't looking.
He grabbed his keys from the hook by the door.
The hook was a little crooked. He noticed that now. The keys were on a cheap keychain: a small rubber brain, bright pink, with a tiny smile drawn on it. He didn't remember buying it, but it fit the rest of his life a little too well.
"Of course," he muttered. "On brand."
He slipped on his shoes by the mat. They were worn in the middle, comfortable in that way old shoes are, molding to the shape of his feet. They made him feel like he'd walked these floors a lot.
He couldn't recall many of those walks.
He opened the door.
The hallway outside was narrow and dimly lit, the kind of beige that tried to be neutral and ended up looking tired. The carpet had a pattern that might have been squares once but was now mostly just flattened lines.
He locked the door behind him without thinking.
The click sounded final.
He paused for a second, listening.
Nothing.
Just the soft hum of the building—pipes, electricity, the faint vibration of someone's TV several units away.
"Air," he reminded himself.
He took the stairs down instead of the elevator. He wasn't sure if the building even had an elevator. If it did, he didn't feel like being in a small moving box right now.
The stairwell smelled faintly of dust and old paint.
At the bottom, he pushed open the heavy door that led outside.
The street greeted him with a brighter light than his apartment window had promised.
It wasn't crowded, but it wasn't empty either. A couple of people walked past without looking at him. A car rolled by slowly. Somewhere farther down, someone laughed, the sound bouncing off the buildings.
The air smelled like a mix of car exhaust, something frying from a distant kitchen, and city dust.
He stepped out onto the sidewalk.
The building he lived in was one of many—three floors, pale exterior, small balconies with mismatched chairs and plants. Across the street, another building stared back, similar but not identical.
He didn't know the neighborhood's name.
He just knew it was city enough that the sounds never fully stopped, but not loud enough to feel like the center of anything.
He put his hands in his pockets and started walking.
No destination. Just forward.
The sun sat at an angle that suggested late morning, maybe. Not yet noon. The light was strong but not harsh, casting clean shadows on the sidewalk.
He watched his own shadow stretch ahead of him, slightly thinner than he imagined himself.
He hoped that was just the angle.
He passed a small convenience store on the corner. The windows were cluttered with posters and signs—lottery adverts, drink promotions, faded flyers for things that had probably already happened.
He slowed, reading without really reading.
One poster showed a smiling family. Another showed a sports drink bottle exploding with fake water. Another had a cartoon doctor and some text about flu shots.
He kept walking.
A little farther down, someone had taped a hand-made sign to a lamppost: "GUITAR LESSONS – ALL LEVELS – CALL [NUMBER]." The letters were slightly crooked.
He stared at it longer than it deserved.
It was such a normal thing. Lessons. Schedules. People deciding to learn hobbies.
He tried to picture himself in a life where the biggest problem was forgetting guitar practice.
His head throbbed once in response.
"Right," he said quietly. "Too much."
He moved on.
The sidewalk turned slightly as the street curved.
He passed a narrow alley that smelled like garbage and old rain. A cat watched him from a ledge, eyes half-closed.
"Hey," he said without stopping.
The cat ignored him.
He didn't take it personally.
Farther ahead, the buildings opened up a bit. A small strip of businesses lined one side of the street: a laundromat, a tiny nail salon, something that looked like a hair place, and a café squeezed into a corner spot.
The café had a chalkboard sign outside.
The chalk lines were bright white on black, with a few simple drawings of cups and lines of steam. The words advertised coffee, pastries, and "STUDENT DISCOUNT."
The word "student" scratched at something in his head.
He slowed again.
He remembered sitting in a different café once, somewhere else, a notebook open in front of him and a textbook beside it. Highlighted phrases. Diagrams of neurons and brain structures.
His brain pulsed in warning.
He took a step back mentally.
"I get it," he muttered. "Just looking. Not digging."
He went inside the café anyway.
The bell over the door chimed lightly as he pushed it open.
Inside, the air was cooler than outside. It smelled like coffee, sugar, and something baked. The place was small, with a handful of tables, a counter with a glass display of pastries, and a menu on the wall written in chalk.
A couple of people sat with laptops, plugged into the wall, typing. A barista in a dark apron stood behind the counter, wiping it down.
"Hey," the barista said, glancing up. "What can I get you?"
Larius hesitated.
He'd already had coffee.
His head didn't exactly want more caffeine, but his body liked the idea of holding another warm mug. It was something to do with his hands.
"Uh… just a small coffee," he said. "Black."
The barista nodded and moved to start it.
Larius scanned the menu while he waited, not really registering the options. His eyes caught on little details instead: the way the chalk letters weren't perfectly even, the tiny smudge where someone had erased a price and rewritten it, the faint stain on the corner of the counter.
He paid with card without thinking much about it.
His hand knew the motion. The PIN code came easily.
The barista handed him a steaming cup.
"Sugar, cream are over there," they said, nodding toward a small station.
"Thanks," Larius answered.
He didn't add anything to the drink.
He took a seat by the window.
From this angle, the street looked different again.
He could see farther down, to where the road eventually crossed a bigger one. Cars flowed through the intersection. A bus paused, opened its doors, closed them again.
He wrapped both hands around the cup and watched the world move.
The café sounds formed a soft background—quiet conversation, the hiss of the espresso machine, the clink of cups on saucers.
He let his mind drift, carefully avoiding certain paths.
He thought about colors instead.
The walls of the café were a muted olive green. Not his favorite, but not unpleasant. The chairs were dark wood. The tabletops were scratched but clean.
His eyes kept coming back to a poster on the far wall.
It wasn't big. Just a simple rectangular print with a pale blue background and some text.
He squinted.
It was some kind of local community notice—job fair, maybe. Small font. A logo in one corner.
His gaze slid off it.
He didn't feel like reading too much text right now.
He took a sip of coffee.
It was stronger than the one he'd made at home. Bitter, but in a way that woke up his tongue.
He realized he felt a little less like floating away.
That was something.
He pulled his phone out.
The signal here was better than in his apartment, for some reason.
He opened his browser again, almost on autopilot.
The last search terms were still there: first aid, grounding techniques.
He scrolled up and down, not clicking anything.
Then, before he could second-guess himself, he tapped the search bar and typed:
"how to stop headaches without medicine"
The results were less scary this time.
Drink water. Use cold or warm compresses. Rest in a dark room. Try simple stretches. Manage stress.
He read through a few suggestions.
Most of them sounded obvious.
Still, he bookmarked one page anyway.
He didn't know if he would ever remember to look at it later, but it made him feel like he was doing something.
His thumb hovered over the search bar again.
He thought of the letters he'd tried to type before.
L. A. P.
His forehead tightened.
He didn't type them.
Instead, he wrote:
"what to do when your memory feels blurry"
The answers were vague and broad. Sleep more. See a doctor. Track symptoms. Limit alcohol. Avoid stress.
He snorted quietly.
"Yeah, sure," he said under his breath. "I'll just… avoid stress."
He swapped apps.
His music playlists stared back at him.
He considered putting one on, but his head gave a small warning pulse, so he didn't.
He locked the phone and put it face-down on the table.
Someone laughed behind him.
It wasn't very loud, but it stood out.
Two people at a nearby table were talking. They looked like they were in their twenties, maybe. One wore a hoodie with some sports team logo, the other had a backpack on the floor and a notebook open in front of them.
"…I'm serious," the one with the notebook was saying. "They had this flyer for a ride-along thing? You can sign up and go with an officer in the patrol car."
"No way," the hoodie one said. "Like in the shows?"
"Yeah, like in the shows," the other answered, rolling their eyes. "Except not as dramatic, I guess. It's still the LAPD, though."
The letters hit Larius like a small, soft punch.
He stared hard at his coffee.
His head gave a tiny twitch.
LAPD.
He hadn't asked to hear it.
It came to him anyway.
His fingers tightened on the cup.
The conversation behind him went on.
"Dude, that's insane," the hoodie one said. "You're actually gonna do it?"
"I don't know," the notebook one replied. "But the poster said they're recruiting hard right now. Something about opportunities, career, blah blah. I just thought, hey, ride-along sounds cool."
"Is that at, like, the academy or something?"
"I think it's just sign-up online. Some info session first."
The words blurred together.
"Academy."
"Recruiting."
"LAPD."
They floated around in his head, not linking to anything solid, but not leaving either.
His tongue felt dry.
He took another sip just to have something to do.
The coffee tasted the same.
His heartbeat felt louder in his chest.
He stared at the reflection in the window instead of the street, watching the vague shape of his own face.
He couldn't read his expression.
Maybe it was blank.
Maybe he was more used to that than he thought.
The two behind him changed topics eventually, moving on to something about rent and roommates and someone borrowing socks without asking.
The pressure in his chest eased a little.
The headache did not.
It didn't spike this time.
It just hung there, a steady weight.
He finished his coffee slowly.
When the cup was empty, he sat there for a while, holding it anyway.
He wasn't sure how long he'd been in the café.
The light outside had shifted a bit when he finally stood up.
He threw the cup away in the bin by the door and gave the barista a small nod on his way out.
The bell chimed again.
The street welcomed him back.
He walked with no more purpose than he'd had before.
The air felt heavier now. Or maybe that was just his head.
He turned down a side street he didn't think he'd taken before.
It looked like all the other streets, in the way city streets often do—windows, doors, cars, a stray leaf stuck to a crack in the pavement. But the shadows fell a little differently here.
He followed the sidewalk until it hit a busier road.
On the corner, a tall metal stand held several posters and notices under a plastic cover.
He almost walked past it.
Then a word caught his eye.
"CAREERS."
He stopped.
The largest poster was glossy, in bright blue and white. It showed a group of people in uniform, standing in a line, serious but not unfriendly.
The logo near the top was one he didn't fully recognize but half-knew from somewhere.
His gaze slid lower.
"JOIN THE LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT."
His head throbbed.
Right under that, in bold letters:
"LAPD – UNRIVALED SINCE 1869."
He swallowed.
The poster went on about opportunities, training, benefits. There was a website link, a phone number, some fine print.police1
He read the first line twice.
JOIN.
It felt less like a suggestion and more like a dare.
He didn't know if it was meant to.
He realized his hands were curled into fists at his sides.
He forced them to relax.
"Yeah, right," he muttered. "That's… not happening."
His voice sounded small out here.
The city didn't care.
He couldn't look away from the word for a few more seconds.
LAPD.
It didn't send a lightning bolt of recognition through him. There was no sudden flash of memory, no montage of images.
Just a slow, quiet sinking feeling.
Like seeing a word in a language you barely know and realizing you've seen it in a different context before.
His head pulsed again, stronger.
He stepped back.
The pain eased a little, like he'd moved away from something physically, not just visually.
"Okay," he said. "Got it."
He turned and walked away from the poster.
He didn't look back.
By the time he got back to his building, the light had shifted again.
He wasn't sure how long he'd walked.
His legs didn't feel tired. His mind did.
The stairs felt steeper going up than they had going down.
Inside his apartment, the air was cooler, quieter. The faint smell of coffee still lingered.
He shut the door and leaned his back against it for a moment.
His head throbbed once more for good measure.
He closed his eyes.
"LAPD," he said under his breath, testing the feel of the word in his mouth.
His temples squeezed.
He opened his eyes again.
"Okay," he sighed. "That's a work in progress."
He moved on autopilot toward the kitchen.
He poured himself a glass of water this time instead of more coffee.
The first sip felt strange after all the bitterness. Plain. Clean. It washed the taste of the day down his throat.
He took the glass to the table and sat down.
The laptop waited.
He stared at it like it might bite if he got too close.
The ridiculous thing was, some part of him wanted to type the letters now.
L. A. P. D.
Just to confirm. Just to get the official website. Just to read the words and see what they did to him.
Another part of him—the part that had made his head hurt earlier—was already tensing up in anticipation.
He rested his forehead in his hand.
"Compromise," he said quietly. "We can do compromises, right?"
He took a breath and opened the laptop.
The screen came to life.
He opened the browser.
The search bar looked back at him, empty and waiting.
He typed:
"basic requirements to be a police officer"
Not LAPD. Not specifically. Just… general.
The results came up.
Age, high school education, background checks, physical fitness tests, academy (training.criminaljusticedegreeschools)
He clicked one article.
It talked about minimum age—around 21. Education. Clean record. Physical agility. Written exams. Psychological evaluations.
He skimmed.
His eyes snagged on the words "psychological evaluation."
He almost laughed.
"Yeah," he said softly. "That'd go well."
He imagined sitting in a room with someone, trying to explain how his memories felt misaligned, how certain words physically hurt, how he knew the concept of dissociation and memory interference and yet still couldn't make his own mind line up.
He imagined the look he'd get.
He closed the tab.
He didn't look up specific departments.
Not yet.
His head didn't reward him, exactly, but it didn't punish him either.
That was something.
He opened a blank document instead.
The cursor blinked at the top of the empty page.
He wasn't sure why he'd done that.
Maybe part of him thought writing things down would help. That was what people always said, right? Journaling. Tracking symptoms. Externalizing thoughts.
He typed slowly.
"Today I woke up and the ceiling felt both familiar and wrong."
He stared at the sentence.
It looked stupid and dramatic.
He kept it anyway.
He pressed Enter.
"I walked outside. There was a café. I heard people say 'LAPD' and it hurt my head."
He winced at how it sounded.
Like he was making things up.
Like an excuse.
He kept that, too.
He kept writing in short, clumsy lines. No structure. Just dumping.
He wrote about the bench memory, even though it hadn't been today. He wrote about the missing step, the way the air felt on his skin, the way the apartment felt like his and not his.
He didn't bother making it pretty.
He didn't show it to anyone.
By the time he stopped, the document was a messy block of text.
No paragraphs. Just thoughts separated by blank lines when he felt like it.
His head still hurt.
But the pressure in his chest had eased a little.
He saved the file without thinking about what to name it.
The cursor blinked in the "File Name" field.
He typed:
"missing_frames_1"
He hit save.
He pushed the laptop away and leaned back in his chair.
The crack in the ceiling stared down at him, patient.
He stared back.
"Okay," he said for what felt like the hundredth time that day. "So. Air helped a little. Writing helped a little."
He let the words hang in the quiet.
Something tugged at the edge of his awareness.
A half-formed thought.
He chased it carefully.
College. Psychology. The lecture about how the brain protects itself from overload. Defense mechanisms. Adaptive strategies.
Maybe this was that.
Maybe his own mind was trying to keep him from breaking completely.
Or maybe he was already broken and this was just a neat story he was telling himself to make it feel less scary.
He didn't know.
He wasn't sure which answer he preferred.
He closed his eyes.
For a second, he saw a flash of that other life again—a different room, a different country, a different version of himself sitting at a different desk.
Then it was gone.
Like a missing frame in a film.
He opened his eyes.
Only this room remained.
The lamp. The rug. The mug. The crack.
He exhaled slowly.
Tomorrow, he told himself somewhere deep down, he could try to be braver. Try typing more specific things. Maybe actually put "LAPD" into the search bar. Maybe look up that show with the cop he half-remembered.
Not today.
Today had been enough.
He stood up, joints popping a little, and moved around the small apartment turning on lights as the sky outside darkened.
The day slipped away into evening, then into night, without anything dramatic happening.
Just a man in a quiet apartment, noticing colors and cracks and words that made his head hurt, trying very hard to stay in one piece.