Chapter 1

I wake up at 3:33 every night.

Not around 3:33. Not approximately. Exactly 3:33 AM, down to the second.

My eyes open like someone flipped a switch in my brain, and I'm not groggy, not disoriented, not clawing my way up from some dream I can't remember. I'm just awake. Completely and immediately awake.

It started eight months ago. I've stopped fighting it.

The first few weeks, I thought something was wrong with me. Stress, maybe. I'd just started a new job, moved to a new apartment, ended a relationship that had been dying for longer than I wanted to admit. Plenty of reasons for my sleep to go sideways.

I bought blackout curtains. Downloaded a white noise app. Took melatonin until I was practically drowning in the stuff. Nothing made a difference.

3:33. Every single night. Like clockwork that someone else was winding.

But the waking up isn't the strange part. I could live with waking up.

The strange part is what I see when my eyes open.

For seventeen seconds, my bedroom isn't quite my bedroom anymore. Same dimensions. Same layout. Same faint amber glow from the streetlight outside bleeding through the window. But the details are wrong.

There's another bed where mine should be. A bigger one, with a wooden headboard I've never owned. Another nightstand, the kind with actual drawers instead of the cheap flat-pack thing I bought when I moved in. Different sheets. A darker color, maybe navy or charcoal, hard to tell in the low light.

And there's another version of me. Sleeping in that bed. Breathing slow and easy under those unfamiliar covers.

The first time it happened, I screamed. Actually screamed, loud enough that my neighbor knocked on the wall. I sat there in the dark with my heart trying to crack through my ribs, convinced I'd finally lost my mind.

Seventeen seconds of impossibility, and then everything snapped back to normal. My bed. My cheap nightstand. My gray sheets tangled around my legs.

I didn't sleep the rest of that night. Or the next.

But it kept happening. 3:33 AM. Seventeen seconds. The other bedroom. The other me.

You'd be amazed what you can get used to.

I've catalogued the differences now. I keep a notebook on my nightstand, and when the seventeen seconds end, I write down everything I noticed before it fades. The details feel slippery if I don't pin them down immediately, like trying to hold onto a dream that's already dissolving.

The other bedroom has a plant by the window. Something leafy and green that looks like it actually gets watered regularly. I've never been able to keep a plant alive for more than a month.

There's a book on the other nightstand. I can never quite make out the title in the dark, but it's thick, with a red spine. I don't read much anymore. Used to, back in college, back when I had time and attention span for things that didn't glow and scroll.

The curtains are blue instead of gray. A deep blue, almost the color of a bruise. I remember standing in the store when I moved in, holding up fabric samples, trying to decide between blue and gray. I went with gray because it felt safer. More neutral. Less like a commitment to actually living in this place.

I wonder sometimes about the version of me who chose blue. What else did they choose differently? What fork in what road put a plant by their window and a book by their bed and a headboard that looks like it was built to last?

For seventeen seconds every night, I watch them sleep. I watch myself sleep. Whatever the right way to say that is.

They never stir. Never sense me watching. Just breathe in that slow, deep rhythm of someone who sleeps well, sleeps easy, sleeps like they're not being observed by something that shouldn't exist.

I saw two different doctors about this.

The first one, my regular GP, listened to my description with the kind of patient expression that told me she'd already decided I was stressed and possibly depressed before I finished my second sentence. She prescribed something to help me sleep through the night. It knocked me out cold for seven hours at a stretch, but I still woke up at 3:33. Still saw the other room.

The drugs just made it harder to write things down afterward, my thoughts thick and slow like I was trying to think through syrup.

The second doctor was a sleep specialist.

He had me do an overnight study at a clinic, wired up with electrodes like some kind of science experiment. The results were fascinating, he said. At exactly 3:33 AM, my brain activity spiked in ways he'd never seen before. Not consistent with waking, not consistent with REM, not consistent with anything in his experience. He wanted to do more tests.

I never went back.

What was the point? He could measure that something was happening, but he couldn't see what I was seeing. The readouts would never show him the blue curtains or the plant by the window or the other version of me breathing peacefully in a bed that doesn't exist.

Some things you just have to carry alone.

I've thought about telling someone. Friends, family, the internet. But what would I even say? Every night I briefly visit a parallel dimension where I made different decorating choices? They'd think I was losing it.

Maybe I am losing it.

But the notebook full of details feels too specific for madness. Crazy people don't notice that the other version of themselves sleeps on the left side of the bed instead of the right.

So I've made peace with it. That's what you do with things you can't change or understand or make stop. You make peace. You adapt. You build it into the rhythm of your life like any other inconvenience.

3:33 AM. Seventeen seconds. Watch the other me sleep. Write down what I noticed. Go back to bed.

It's almost meditative now. A strange little ritual that belongs only to me.

Seventeen seconds isn't long. You can hold your breath through anything if you know when it ends. I've timed it with a stopwatch, watched those seconds tick down while the other room shimmered around me. Knowing there's a limit makes it bearable.

Whatever door opens at 3:33, it always closes at 3:33 and seventeen seconds. Reliable as gravity.

I've wondered if the other me ever wakes up too. If they ever open their eyes at 3:33 and see my bedroom, my cheap furniture, my gray curtains. If they've got their own notebook full of details about the sad parallel version of themselves who never bought a plant or a proper headboard.

But they never wake up. In eight months of watching, they've never so much as shifted position during those seventeen seconds. They just sleep, peaceful and oblivious, in their slightly-better life.

I've made peace with it. I really have.

I've stopped taking the pills. Stopped trying to fix something that clearly doesn't want to be fixed. Stopped treating it like a problem and started treating it like a fact. The sky is blue. Water is wet. I wake up at 3:33 and see another version of myself for seventeen seconds.

Life has plenty of room for small impossibilities.

At least, that's what I told myself.

Until last night.

Last night, I woke at 3:33 like always. Opened my eyes to the other bedroom, the blue curtains, the plant by the window casting its familiar shadow against the wall.

But the bed was empty.

No. Not empty.

The other me was sitting up. Covers pushed aside. Body turned toward me in the darkness.

They were awake. For the first time in eight months, they were awake.

And they were looking directly at me.

Not through me. Not past me. At me. The way you look at something you've been waiting to see for a very long time.

I couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Could only stare back at my own face in that wrong room, watching myself watch me.

Here's the thing. If you'd been trying to make contact with someone for months, and it finally worked, you'd be relieved. Happy, even. You'd expect to see recognition, excitement, the kind of expression that says finally.

That's not what I saw.

Their face was tight with something that looked a lot like fear. Eyes too wide. Jaw clenched. The tendons in their neck stood out like they were bracing for impact.

Then they leaned forward. Slowly. Deliberately. Like they'd rehearsed this moment but wished they didn't have to perform it.

Their mouth opened.

They were saying something. One word, short and sharp, shaped carefully so I could read their lips across whatever impossible distance separated us.

They repeated it. Again. Again. Each time more urgent than the last.

The light was too dim. The angle was wrong. I couldn't make it out completely. But I caught enough to know it wasn't a greeting. The shape was wrong for hello. Wrong for help, even.

It looked like a warning. A single syllable, hard at the edges. The kind of word you use when someone's about to step into traffic.

And then the seventeen seconds ended.

My bedroom snapped back. My ceiling. My sheets. My own ragged breathing loud in the sudden silence.

I lay there until morning, replaying those final seconds behind my closed eyes. The shape of their mouth. The fear in their face. The way they kept repeating that word like my life depended on me understanding.

I still don't know what they were trying to tell me.

But I know it wasn't good news.

And I know, when 3:33 comes around again tonight, I'm going to find out whether I want to or not.