Wheels within wheels

I laid down in the street today. I don’t know what I was trying to do. Was I trying to find a way out? Was I going to lie there until something happened, my death, an end to the cycles? 

I laid there for hours. And then they arrived.

All of them, the faceless horde, they gathered around me and watched. And it hit me.

They’re me. I’m them. We are each a nation, independent, and yet, part of a greater whole. Myself. All of them were just a fraction of what made me, trapped and lost in their own cycles.  I will not give in to this place. I will not loose myself to it, I will not share their fate. I will find a way out, for myself, for all of me.

This place knows. Knows I know of it. I left the diner to find something more nutritious than meat patties and vegetables. I took great care to stay on the streets, in the open, anywhere I could make an easy escape. The deli nearby was a nightmare. My heart nearly hammered it’s way up my throat, it was too small, I could swear I heard the rattling of cans whenever I turned my back.

And then I smelled it. Smoke. The acrid smell of burning wood and melting plastic. I didn’t need to go back. I knew, I just knew. The diner, all it’s contents, destroyed. There’s a latin phrase for this. Genius Loci. I thought I was trapped in a never ending nightmare. I never stopped to think of it, assuming the nightmare was no more aware than I was of the cells in my body. But it is. It’s awake. It knows me.

I saw a figure the other day. Not a retreating one, or something out of the corner of my eye. Someone else.

I was sitting in the diner reading the notes, as has been my ritual since I found this place. When I looked up, out the window, there it was. At the street corner, a distant figure, watching. I contemplated chasing after it, the thought of social contact after so long nearly stirred me to my feet until I remembered my readings. Blurred, faceless antagonists lurking on the streets, in the fog. 

I sat there, heart crushed, debating with myself over whether to barricade the door or not. In the end, I pushes a table against it and braced it with a few stools. It won’t keep anything out, but the noise will wake me if I’m asleep, and at very best, it will buy me precious seconds to escape.

I’m almost through this stack. One more page, I promise myself, one more page and then I’ll move on. I’ve been telling myself that for days.

I’m currently in a diner. Odd place to rest, yes. Up until a few days ago, I had been wandering through the town, drowning in a sea of rusting metal and decaying houses.  Each time I passed this diner, I was filled with an oddly familiar, nameless fear.

Yesterday, I went in.

Nothing was as expected. Instead of dust caked tables and floors, I was greeted by notebooks. Dozens of them. Hundreds of them. All neatly stacked, from floor to ceiling, some with only a fine coating of dust, others with what could be years or decades piled onto them. Eager to find facts, I ripped into them.

Each and everyone of them was written by me. All of them carry the same theme, the same content, journalistic style, lists of names, dates, places. Rantings and ravings before a blank silence. Every notebook is incomplete, all halt on the author, myself, losing hope, giving into fear and paranoia. 

It’s maddening to think I’ve been here before. To think that I’ve been here for so long and always met the same fate. Did I forget myself each time? Was I somehow subconsciously aware, like a word forever on the tip of my tongue?

I will not give into this place, whatever it is.

This place is..broken. Caught in an instant of time like a fly in amber. Everything is the way it was the day before, reset like a clock. The stores that I’ve been taking my food from, the pantries I’ve raided, no matter how much I take, the next day they’re full again, shelves bursting with a wealth of food. And yet my food supply remains the same, my place of residence holds onto every little change I make at the end of the day. Am I really in a town? Or am I like a hamster in a wheel, always running to the same place? I’m not so sure of anything in this place.

But no matter what I do, I can’t escape the feeling I’ve done it before. Deja vu is always on my mind.