To lie is to know

Elias hadn't planned to spend his lunch break in a dusty used bookstore, but the rain had come down hard and fast, trapping him inside. He wandered the aisles, brushing his fingers over cracked spines, the musty smell of old paper pressing against him like a heavy coat.

That was when he saw it: The Paradoxes of Identity.

The title tugged at something deep and unsettled, a chord he didn't know had been strung. Lately, he'd been feeling unmoored. His job, his relationships, his place in the world, none of it felt as solid as it once had. Maybe it never had been.

Elias had always been a thinker, even as a child. Teachers praised his curiosity but warned his parents about his tendency to fixate. A simple riddle could leave him awake for hours, staring at the ceiling, caught in loops of "what if?" and "why not?" His parents, kind but practical, dismissed it as a phase. "You think too much, Elias," his mother often said with a gentle smile. "Sometimes you just have to let things be."

But Elias never learned to let things be.

He bought the book and spent the rest of the day ignoring emails at his desk, reading instead. One line stood out, bold and unrelenting:

If every plank of a ship is replaced, piece by piece, until no original parts remain, is it still the same ship? And if those old pieces are rebuilt into another ship, which one is the real Ship of Theseus?

The question gnawed at him. That night, as he stood in the bathroom brushing his teeth, he stared at himself in the mirror. His face had changed over the years, softened and weathered in ways he hadn't fully noticed until now. Every cell in his body had been replaced countless times.

Am I the same Elias I was twenty years ago?
And if I'm not... who is?

The obsession grew quickly. His notebook filled with diagrams of two ships, one built from the original planks and one from the replacements.

He imagined the process in excruciating detail. Each plank removed from the ship was set aside carefully, stored in some imaginary warehouse, each marked with the label: original. And when the last plank had been replaced, someone quietly began reconstructing it from the old pieces, every nail and beam precisely as they had been before.

Elias couldn't let it go. "If the old ship exists again," he muttered to himself one night, pacing his apartment, "then it hasn't been destroyed. But if it's still the same, what does that make the other?"

The world around him began to feel tenuous, as if it, too, could be divided into two realities: the one he knew and the one he'd lost.

At first, the changes were subtle. Elias didn't notice them right away; they were small, almost imperceptible. His old leather wallet, fraying at the edges, looked new one day—too new. The familiar creases, the soft worn-in corners that had defined it for years, were gone, replaced by a surface so smooth it felt foreign under his fingertips. When he mentioned it to a friend, they waved him off. "You probably just haven't noticed it before."

But Elias had noticed. He knew his wallet, every scuff and scratch, every mark that told a story. This wasn't it. His suspicion grew, creeping like a cold fog. He began to wonder if other things in his life were being replaced. His worn desk chair, his favourite coffee mug—each one felt subtly off. The coffee mug he cherished, with the chipped handle, suddenly gleamed as if it had never been used. The texture of the wooden floor in his apartment became more uniform, more polished, smoother than the rough-hewn planks that had creaked under his feet for years. Each time, the old versions lingered in his mind, like memories of things once real, now replaced by facsimiles, waiting to be rebuilt.