The hum of the refrigerators droned on as I walked through the store. Aisles of brightly colored packaging faced me and begged me to pick each one up. I mindlessly picked up frozen cinnamon rolls and thought about how I could control what would happen the next morning when I ate them.
I rounded the corner of the aisle to the next hallway of products when I heard an annoying whirr from a light above me. Five people stood farther down the next freezer aisle, staring through the frosted doors and not paying attention to the noise or one another. Suddenly, we all looked up when we heard a loud crash from the ceiling. The noise ringed through my eyes and I could feel the echoes from the power of the noise in my head. I heard screams and saw a white flash, and that’s the last thing I remember.
I don’t know how long it lasted, because the next thing I remembered was laying on the cold, concrete floor in pure silence. There was no hum of refrigerators or buzz from fluorescent lights, just the air from my mouth hitting the floor and condensing. I opened my eyes slowly, one at a time, and saw nothing, but felt the floor on my stomach. I stood up. Looking down the aisle, I couldn’t see much, the store was pitch black. The little light there was shined in from the windows at the front of the store.
I turned toward the registers and scanned around. Everything was pitch black and the only thing I saw was bright blue light from the open doors and atrium windows behind the registers. I started walking towards the doors. As I walked, the only sound I heard in the store was the echo of my footsteps bouncing around the inside of the store. “Where is everyone?” I thought.
I made my way to the atrium and looked outside. There was nothing there. The sky, if I could even call it that, was bright and in an eerie shade of light gray and stretched endlessly in every direction. I stepped out the front doors. At my feet, a light gray and perfectly flat surface extended in every direction for as far as I could see. I looked up to see where the sun was, but found that there wasn’t one. The sky was illuminating me and the front of the store. “What the hell,” I thought. This place, wherever I was, started to scare me.
Just as I went to turn around and go back inside the store, the front doors and windows were boarded up out of thin air. I was stuck. “S***,” I thought to myself. “What am I supposed to do if I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere? Wait, no, not nowhere. I’m stuck in the middle of nothing.”
I turned back around, but this time, I saw a small dot on the horizon. It looked ominous, even in its miniscule form, but I had nothing for scale to see what it was. So, naturally, I started walking to it. Slowly, my walk picked up to a jog, and finally a sprint. It wasn’t getting any closer. I turned around and found myself at the front of the supermarket. “What, no, this can’t be! I must’ve been running for ten minutes!”
I kicked the bricks of the store and cursed. I paced around for a few steps, and cursed some more. I spat at the ground and nothing landed. I cursed once more and finally hit my head against the wall of the store until I passed out.

I came to later, but I had no idea when. Everything looked exactly the same. “Everything.” Heh, that’s funny. That was no everything here. Even being stuck in the middle of the Sahara would be better than laying here. This must be what hell is like.
I looked down at my body and saw I was wearing different clothes. Rather than wearing sweatpants and a shirt, I was in a blank white hospital gown.
I closed my eyes for a few seconds, clenching them as tight as I could and then screamed at the top of my lungs. As the scream rang throughout the air, wait, rang? I stopped screaming and thought about that. It sounded like my scream was echoing off walls. And not walls an infinite distance away, but walls right outside of my head. Nervously, I pulled each eyelid apart to see what was around me.
A room. A small room. And not just any small room, but my room. I turned 360 degrees and slowly analyzed every square inch of the walls and floors. After I did that once, I did it again. “I haven’t been here in years. How did I get here?” I thought. The room wasn’t just my room, it was my room when I was born.
Curiosity struck me, and I turned around to the crib. I inched closer to the crib before I peeked in, and nearly fell over. My heart raced so fast when I looked in and saw me, baby me, sitting in the crib giggling. I reached out to touch his… my finger, and I found it passed right through it. “No,” I thought. “No no no no! This isn’t real! None of it is real! Why?!!”
I screamed and hollered in rage and tried to throw the crib to the side but my arms passed right through it and I fell over. “NO! I want out! Let me out of this hell!”
I jumped to my feet and kicked the door so hard it jarred open, and the room behind it caused to go silent immediately. Behind the door of my baby bedroom was the bedroom I had when I was 8 when I was in my new house. Through the door, I could see my bed and the night table next to it with my rocket ship lamp and the truck I used to keep there to play with every morning. I heard a little voice playing with trucks behind the door, and my mind stopped. “This can’t be me again…”
Sure enough, as I walked in the room, I saw 8 year old me sitting with trucks and dolls on the floor, making pretend. I tried to touch, but once again, I could not. Disappointed, I resigned to sitting on the floor and watching. I sat and watched. Hours passed, and I still watched. The only emotion that passed over me was happiness. Happiness that I was watching myself play, years ago. It seemed so innocent.
After awhile, I stood up and walked towards the door, taking one last glance at myself before opening the door and peeking through. Holy s***. Another room from my past, this one from when I was probably 15 or 16. I saw myself laying on the bed with a magazine in my hands. I looked around. There were apparitions of people, dozens of them, moving around. They were merely faint outlines, and they sat on the floor and walked in and out of the door. All while this was happening, my teenage self just laid there, flipping the pages of the magazine. I looked towards the window and I saw something that surprised me. It was me, running around just a few hours prior in the wasteland from before. What was going on? I tried not to think too much of it, and headed into the next room.
I was much less nervous to open another door, and I wasn’t surprised when I saw my college dorm room. I was sitting in the desk chair with my books spread out while I saw apparitions of all my friends around the room and a stronger image of my roommate sitting on his bed throwing darts across the room. I laughed to myself at the strangeness of this. I was just relieving memories through this weird time loop. I was curious to continue, so I turned and opened the door to the next room.
This door was harder to open, but I gave it a heavier push and found myself in my room. The room of the present. I looked at my disheveled bed and the clothes strewn across the floor in front of the closet. This room was different. There was no other me there, just myself standing here. I tried to touch something, and to my surprise, I was able to pick up a shirt from the floor. When I picked it up, I noticed my pants when I bent over. They were the sweatpants I was wearing before, not the hospital gown I had on earlier. “Weird,” I thought. “Does this mean I’m back?”
Everything seemed normal for a second, until I looked over to my window and noticed the blinds were closed. Strange. I never closed the blinds. Once again, curiosity took over, and I turned the rod on the window to open the blinds. Another all to familiar feeling took over, and I was surprised at what I saw outside. It was the white void from before, and hundreds of copies of me running towards an equal number of small dots in the distance. The weird thing, though, is they didn’t get any closer and didn’t get any farther from me. Where were they running?
I didn’t think much of it and turned to leave the room through the door. When I tried to turn the knob, it didn’t move at all. I shook it and tried to turn it again. No luck. I pushed on the door to see if it would open that way, and it didn’t work. Confused, I turned back around and noticed the blinds were closed again, and a note sat on my pillow. “That wasn’t there before,” I thought.
I picked up the note and read it. “There is no future, only now. Observe the past, but there is only now.” Suddenly, all the gears in my head clicked together. I couldn’t open the door because I couldn’t see what was ahead of me. I could only see what had happened and only change what was happening now. It all made sense!
Just as these thoughts registered, I heard the sound of a tornado and saw a wind pick up and swirl around everything in the room. I stood, staring in awe, and then I felt a sharp ache all throughout my head. I closed my eyes, and felt the void close around me

There first thing I heard was the beep of a hospital machine. I felt a fuzzy blanket over my feet and felt an ache in my neck and back. I opened my eyes.
I was in a small hospital room by myself, the TV turned to “The Price is Right.” A nurse walked in. “Where am I? What happened?” I asked her. She told me there was an accident at the grocery store and a light had fell on me. She said I was lucky to be alive.
As I laid there thinking this over, she told me they were monitoring my brain activity over the three days I had been passed out. She said the doctors had never seen so much brain activity in a patient with such severe trauma. She asked me if I remembered anything from when I was asleep. I contemplated an answer, but couldn’t muster the courage to explain what I had experience in my head. I simply said, “Beats me why that happened. I don’t remember anything.” Satisfied with the answer, she told me she’d get the doctor and then turned and left the room.
It was a lie though, and in my dreams I had learned one thing. I taught myself one thing, deep inside my mind. I couldn’t control what could happen… I could only control what’s happening now.