AnonymousD6
SHORT STORY
I never thought my life would end up like this. Thirty years old, scrolling through pictures of people who used to be my friends, now smiling with their spouses and children while I sat alone, wondering where everything went wrong.
I cried myself to sleep one night - not just because I was tired, but because I was angry at myself, angry at time, angry at the choices I never made. I whispered into the dark, "If I could just go back..."
And when I opened my eyes again, I had.
The cracked screen of my old flip phone blinked on the nightstand. Posters I hadn't seen in a decade clung to the walls. My mom's voice - young, loud, alive - called me from the kitchen. I was twenty again. Ten whole years rewound in a single night.
It felt like a miracle. A second chance. The universe had pressed reset, and I was holding the controller.
At first it was hilarious. Knowing the drama my friends would go through, I laughed at their tears and crushes like some time-traveler babysitter. I flirted with the guy I'd been too shy to confess to the first time around. I changed my diet, skipped the dead-end jobs, hugged my mom more. For once, I thought I could fix everything.
But time doesn't like being rewritten.
The more I interfered, the stranger things became. Songs played on the radio that shouldn't exist yet.
I thought I was being clever, saving my friend from a tragedy that destroyed her life the first time. But the moment I pulled her out of danger, something else shifted - worse, crueler. It was like fate was a scale, and every good I added tipped something else into darkness.
And then, the punishment came for me.
My lover - the man I was finally brave enough to hold onto this time - vanished. One morning, he left a note on the fridge: Gone to get us food. Be back soon. Hours passed. Days. He never came home. And I knew, deep down, why.