i was looking for a good time not a long time i think you got it wrong.

_

The alarm glares at you in red. 3:14, it grits out. It's three-fourteen-AM and you've forgotten what you look like again. It's three-fourteen-AM and you've been laying there, in your bed, since-since a long time. Two-AM at least. Earlier, maybe. You cleaned, you think. You remember that about as much as you remember your name in that you don't. You forgot your name, you forgot who you are again.

It's 3:27AM and you've forgotten who you are. It's almost funny. A joke gone too far.

It's a reoccurring theme, and, at this point it might even be a personality trait. You don't know what you look like, and your name is fuzzy in your own head. You know your teeth are sharp, you can feel the scrape on your tongue. You cannot name the color of your skin. You've forgotten that, too. Living for so long has you confused. You wake up, take a breath, in out. You're going to forget everything one day. Maybe today, but later. Maybe later today. 4:18, your alarm says, voice tinny and red.

In, two, out, two.

(4:59, you keep breathing and dreaming with your eyes wide open.)

The alarm rings. You've been up all night; that's been a reoccurring theme, too.

There's no sunlight and your alarm reads 5:00 in bright red numbers. You stare at it, like it might tell you why you're always awake instead of waking up. Maybe sleep is a myth-or something that only ever happens to children. You remember sleeping when you were younger, or. Well.

You didn't get much sleep, but back then you were tired. At least that. At least that. It isn't good enough but at least that. You're losing time, you realize, slowly. It's not in any way that matters, not to someone like you, but you're losing time. It's slipping through your hands like sand, even if it doesn't get caught on the ends of your chipped fingernails. You're losing time. Like it's something you put down and forgot to write about. You're losing time, again. You've seen everything, but you've forgotten everything, your hourglass is running out. It hurts your head to think about, a brilliant white pain breaking behind your eyes. Now you're wasting time on this.

5:58 your alarm reads in bright red, angry numbers. You blink, once, twice. Take a breather. In, two, out, two. There isn't a moment to lose when you're losing all of them. It's like a war, you muse. All of it's gone to shit anyway, so why stick around for the aftermath; the build back up takes too long and you've got shell shock for days. You work toward something you'll never see, but you will see it. So what's the point, really?

A sour little smile spreads on your chapped lips, breaks the skin. You don't bother with chapstick. Not today. Not ever. Or maybe you did, but you wouldn't really know, would you?

You taste blood.

(Breakfast is a complicated ordeal, you know that something is going to happen today-but something happens everyday with your job. You should have just stayed in the warm-dry-hungry, sun-dipped, cold water and decaying. You were happier there, you think, you were miserable everywhere, but you were less so there.)

"Up," you whisper, moving your arms. "get up."

Your frozen, except your not. You're really, really not. So you bite the bullet and pull yourself up up up―out of the gutter and out of your own head. You tumble over your own feet; trip on air, you don't have the space in your head for this and you don't want to lose time again. You know you will whe you blink but your eyes are burning so badly and if you just closed them and opened them very, very quickly then maybe-

Close your eyes for half a second, you stare at the ceiling Iike it has your name in the cracks. You stare for a very long time, trying to remember how to read the lines on the wall.

You breathe like it's easy.

6:20 your alarm clock reads. You swallow around doing the lump in your throat and bite the inside of your mouth until you bleed, so you bleed. It stings. It stings but it doesn't hurt and you keep focus on that. Lick your wounds so they hurt, so you can focus. You put on a button up shirt from the floor; you take a pair of pants from a drawer where everything is folded neatly from yesterday. A spree, maybe, where you moped the walls and bleached the toilet because you couldn't sleep. When you had nothing to do you just layer in bed and you stayed there.

Waiting for two to turn into five.

It did, and it worked too well. You're losing time now, you know you're awake but you can't move. Not with that awful thing that sits heavy on your chest. Names you can't remember on your tongue. You keep forgetting everything. You keep losing time.

(What's your name?)

You open your notebook. The razor edges slice through your thumb and you like it. You've learned to like it. You read the first page again, your name is on the top. Good, you think. Good, because otherwise you wouldn't remember even that. If you didn't write it you'd lose more time than anything just trying to remember something so simple. Like your name. Like how to read, like how to speak. You'd lose everything.

_

The route to work is a short one. But you walk slow. You're always early because you never sleep. You never sleep because your always scared. Except-well. That isn't quite right, is it? It's less fear, more the lack of it. You're afraid to sleep and dream that same awful dream, but, but, but. Things will be different, you're sure. You won't scream yourself silly waking up, reminding yourself that nobody else lives in the place you live because if they did they would have left. You're scared you won't be afraid of something that haunts your mind when you can barely keep a grasp on your own name.

You walk to work because if you didn't than you would have nothing to focus on. At least like this you can feel the ache in your feet. You step on the blisters and focus on that, too. The way white hot pain digs into your head. The way nothing changes, not really, not ever.

Repeat it all, your muscles know where to go when your head does not.

History isn't what you teach, but it would have been funny if you did, you muse. That's all you can do. Muse about things that won't happen-or maybe they will. If there's one thing history taught you it's that the presents is a remix off the past in the same way any story is some kid of mush-mash of another.

(You should have taken a literature course. It would have been fun, you muse about that , too.)

The only thing that stays is the feeling, the memory, so you guess that you changed too. You guess you'll never be the same, with how often you forget yourself. Everything you've ever said has been said by someone else, so nothing is really yours, so nothing is you. There is no you. It's funny.

You're losing time again, you muse.

You don't like thinking about it, though. So you think about something else.

The sidewalk is very interesting, you think, looking down. Little squares, one after the other. Nothing is different from another until a flaw comes, until something cracks and flora eats away and then it cracks deeper, and maybe one day it'll get to the core of the universe, maybe it'll be round, or even rectangular. Wouldn't that be a silly world? Where the squares on the sidewalk are circles?

Maybe. Wouldn't it be sillier if the plants were square? If-if-

Oh. You're here.

_

You've gone ways away.

You forgot you moved again. The school was farther than you thought, but it's still close. You can feel the sweat in your socks. It's why you have so many blisters on our feet. It's why you always have a pair of spare clothes, it's why you cleaned last night. It's why you left. You cannot remember if you took a shower, but your hair is wet; you cannot remember if you brushed your teeth but you cannot taste your breath. You cannot remember what you look like, but you are, you know you are. You have to be, because if you aren't alive then the only other option is that you died and didn't remember.

The clock says 7:08 and you're early.

You're always early.

_

Nothing changes, but nothing stays the same. Time confuses you. You wonder if it always has, but you can't remember. Or will you just remember soon? Are you forgetting or-or just coming up blank? What would-he-what's your boss' name again?

(Have you forgotten that too?)

"Nedzu," a soothing sound shakes you from your head. "my name is Nedzu." He waits a moment and then he says the name from the book this morning. You wonder how often he does this. It must be daily, weekly, maybe today is his quota. You don't voice it. You've probably already said it.

"Thank you." You say. You nearly forgot again. There's a round clock on the wall and it says 7:21 in lines and patterns you cannot name.

"Of course." Nedzu says like there's no other option, like he's done it a million times and-well. He has, you muse. "Join me at my office, won't you?"

"Okay." You say. You know you said it a million times before. Just like you've walked to the building a million times. Just like-just like you've forgotten a million times. You leave the room and someone else walks in, and even though you're forgetting everything, you know you've never met this person in your life. She seems just as surprised to see you, to be fair.

You leave the room and lick your lips. They're chapped, you think. You wonder if you can borrow chapstick from anyone.

The room your boss-Nedzu, you think. You have to remember, Nedzu Nedzu Nedzu-takes you into is well furnished. It's calming as it is intimidating, you get the feeling you already knew that. You sit in a spot you've probably sat in thousands of times. You don't know what to do with yourself, so you settle with trying to remember the name of the color your hands are. "Clementine or black?"

"Black." You say, you don't know why. It's a muscle memory, like the way you walked here. Repetition is drilled into you and Nedzu must know that too. He hands you a cup with black tea and two white capsules. You pick them up and you drink them down. The tea burns the sore in your mouth and it starts bleeding again.

The clock reads 7:42. You blink. "Fuck," you groan. "again?"

"Afraid so." Nedzu says.

It's so silly. You keep thinking you'll run out of sand in your hourglass, but every time one side ends, you just flip it back over. "Sorry." You say, just like yesterday and the day before that and the day before that.

"Never mind that. Come now, you have to help me sort the children in all the courses."

"Hey, Nedzu?"

"Yes?" He's somewhere looking for papers you need to sort. His voice sounds more away than he really is. He's faking the pitch, the draft.

"Who was that woman?" There's this kind of longing in your voice, a hollow desperation.

"Who?" Nedzu says, coyly. "Oh! You mean Kayama-sensei, she's a teacher here! I can introduce you both if you'd like."

(You wouldn't like it―that's one more person to lose. You end up losing everyone, and the ones who stay can't keep up. You work in a different universe, in a place, a planet moreover, where anyone else would lose too much time. You've got too much time, you see, so much spare moments that they're impossible to keep track of with all this changing; with everything staying the same.)

"No thank you," you say. "was just curious." She was very pretty, you don't say. She was very pretty and you wanted to know her name.

"I'll organize 1G and 1K." You say, fumbling over your empty cup. It doesn't crack, but it's a near thing.

_

There's something dirty on you, in you, or maybe it's just you-but it's there. It's on your clothes, in your mouth, in the way people say your name. Like how something will always belong to someone-and there was a boy, you think. There was a boy and he thought his brother was a thing. You wonder if the brother thought of his name like you do yours.

You wonder if he hated himself, too.

It's inconsequential, really. You know that you'll lose this at some point; there's only so much white pills and notebooks can cover. Even the most avid writers do not capture every detail. Maybe it's an issue, but you don't think you'll fix it. You always remember eventually; even the things you keep trying to forget. That stuff you want to keep buried in the sand. But it keeps coming up whenever you reset your head-setting yourself straight sends something burning into your chest.

(You keep your head in your chest and you grin wide, wide, wide enough to hurt the corners and tip the fronts, you taste blood and it tastes like something you can't name. The papers in your hands flutter in the breeze but you're finished with them so you put a shoe over; then two, to keep them down, you assure yourself.)

The thing in your mouth is too heavy to name so you shove it down your throat and hope it doesn't come back up like everything else. You wonder how easy it would be to tear the skin off your face and reveal the dirty thing that's made its' home under blue blood and white teeth and cracked bone. Nedzu calls them intrusive thoughts and you wants to rip your arms off and burn them so that only a blackened bone is left.

You spilled pomegranate tea over your clothes and stained them when you were little and you can't remember why. It's a thing with teeth, maybe. Maybe it's why yours are so sharp-well, maybe. It's all a hypothetical, a guess; you aren't a historian and you don't think you want to be. You don't want to look at a time worse than this one, because this one is pretty awful, too. Like pomegranate tea. Like champagne.

(You hate the way that it fizzles in your mouth, the way it burns, sickeningly bittersweet and wonderful in all the worse ways; because you like bittersweet things and you hate not being able to control yourself, even when you don't know who you are, you know you have a thing to control, a vessel, a body. It's the only thing that is yours in every way you can think.)

You'll just drink your lemon soda in peace from behind a graveyard. You know you're an awful thing, so you'll sit where nobody can see the way your head hollows over the setting sun. You'll forget who you are and you'll hate every moment of it until you have your head back-then you'll remember spilling pomegranate tea on white floors and something terrible happening. You don't remember being fourteen, but you don't want to.

Every time you try to think of it, younger, younger, seven and there are flashing lights and that tinny voice in your head crying to you.

(What's your name?)

So you just forget things and write what you remember. Like your name, occasionally.

_

Nobody knows you, not really.

You stick to the walls and the vents and the stars in the dead night sky. You lose yourself, but in a way that is so inescapably you, not that thing that takes over your body when you can't remember. That thing that doesn't remember that body it's stuck in has a name; that it's impossible to lose time when your supply never ends. That thing is drunk on confusion and fear and something like a hazy memory. You're on a high every time you go there, every time you forget.

The roof is your most frequent layabout. You come up here after Nedzu smokes because you hate the smell but you like how thin the air is up here. You like the way it's hard to breathe, and then it isn't. Your body is doing things against your will and it's one of those days. It's eleven-thirty-two. It's eleven-twenty-two and you're on the roof of Yuuei high school to eat your lunch. It's sunny outside, but not for long. You need to finish this before someone can stop you, before you lose time.

(Nedzu stops you when he can, he doesn't get it though, he doesn't hear that same tinny voice in the back of his head, not in the way you do, at least.)

(What's your name?)

Smoke from a cigarette clings in the back of your mouth, though you don't smoke. It's eleven-thirty-two and you know you don't wand to get messy as you often do. You eat your lunch. You eat it so fast you can't taste it, fast enough for it to burn the roof of your mouth but you don't care much. You have things to do.

You jump off the roof.

_