there's a lot about me you don't know

no one was supposed to remember anything. and no one did. but you and jim.

you tried really, really hard to make the best of the situation the first time, once you got over the initial shock of things. alas. to no avail. it happened again.

and again.

and again.

and so many agains.

no matter what you changed. no matter what jim changed. it always came back to this. now you were playing life with cheat codes. it almost felt cheap, the life you lived. and lived. and lived.

it was hard to place value on your experiences and relationships when you knew that most likely nothing would remain in the end. in the beginning. in the next cycle. nevertheless, with the tiniest shred of hope still in the back of your subconscious, you built castles just to watch them be torn down.

and you knew you shouldn’t be doing the things you were doing. it was unfair to all parties involved. you and the people you cared about alike. but it was too hard to stay away.

you weren’t even the same person anymore, but they always stayed.

well, except for jim. he changed as much as you did. flowing with time when everyone else was stuck playing out the reruns of an old television show. this wasn’t his first rodeo, however. and he had gotten out before. you found that comforting.

at least you weren’t being repeatedly woken up to the sound of easy peasy.

at first, the two of you thought that jim had to be the one to initiate the reset. mysteriously, miraculously, unexplainably, he wasn’t. the timeline looped always. even when you kept the timestone out of the picture, the timeline reset again. but y’all we’re sure that his actions had to have set the loop in motion in the first place. this is all you could guess.

y’all were playing a game, but the rulebook was nowhere in sight.

the forever boy, james lake jr, somehow got it in his head that since he was the one to start it all, then he must be the one to end it. not in a i must be the one who cleans up my own mess kind of way, but in a cosmic, destiny kind of way.

not that he wasn’t extremely guilty at the cruel reality that he ruined all your lives, but he felt that the universe was punishing him for not doing the right thing. whatever that right thing may be. he figured there was some magic action he could preform. completing this insane ritual the universe was putting him though, and thus completing the cycle.

you weren’t sure how you fit into all that logic of his. you didn’t care to ask.

you learned a long time ago that it was best not to question these kinds of things. peoples’ thought processes, magic, time. you left as many pots unstirred as you could. it was the only way you managed to keep your sanity in all this.

you weren’t blood-related to the lakes, but in this nebulous time you spent with jim, you began to call him family. he was your closest friend, after all. he was the only one who understood. the only one who could really see you fully nowadays. tbh it kinda felt like being assigned a lab partner, with the timeline acting as both your lab and unwilling experiment.

you didn’t think the universe was punishing him.

then again, you had no other theories to counter the argument.

if anything, you felt like he wasn’t the only one being punished. you were here too, after all.