Desynchronization

I wake up holding my phone, and for a moment I don’t understand why my hand is already clenched around it. The device is warm against my palm. Not just warm like it’s been charging, but warm like skin. The screen is lit in the half-dark of the room as if it has been awake on my behalf. There is no alarm sound, no vibration pattern I recognize, only a soft, persistent tremble that feels less like a notification and more like a pulse.

8.45 a.m.

I stare at the numbers, waiting for them to shift. Waiting for my eyes to correct themselves the way they sometimes do when I wake too suddenly. The digits remain steady and clean, finished in a way that makes my throat tighten. A slow heaviness spreads across my chest. Not panic yet. The thing that comes before panic. The moment your body leans forward into fear before your mind has given it permission.

The bus appears in my mind first, then the gate, then my manager’s face, and after that the familiar sequence of inner bargaining. I begin assembling excuses automatically, phrases I have practiced enough that they almost don’t feel like lies until I hear them out loud. The odd part is how quickly my brain moves. It’s already trying to make a delay sound like an accident instead of what it really feels like: a failure the day will punish me for.

Only then do I notice the silence, and it’s so complete it feels staged, like a set built for a scene. There is no barking. No impatient pacing. No warm breath on my ankle. No small insistence that morning has begun. Mikasa always wakes at seven. Not roughly. Not eventually. Precisely, as if she is answering a bell only she can hear.

“Mikasa?” I call, my voice thick with sleep.

She doesn’t stir, and that alone sharpens my pulse. She’s curled tightly beside the bed, nose tucked under her tail, chest rising and falling in a steady rhythm. She looks comfortable in a way that suggests certainty, like something that expects the world to unfold exactly as it always has. It’s the kind of sleep that belongs to a day with no surprises.

My hand goes to my wrist before I decide to move. The watch reads 5.45 a.m. Relief hits me fast enough to force air out of my lungs, but it’s brittle relief. The kind that cracks the moment you touch it.

“Oh,” I mutter, letting out a short laugh that doesn’t sound like mine. “Okay. Okay.”

I lie back for a moment and watch Mikasa breathe, counting the rise and fall of her chest as if numbers can stabilize reality. Seven breaths. Eight. Nine. The rhythm calms me more than the watch does, because her sleep feels like evidence that time is still behaving somewhere. Still, the pressure at the base of my skull doesn’t loosen. Not pain yet. A tightening. The sense of a knot being drawn slowly.

When I stand, the floor is cool under my feet and that should help, but the air has a warmth to it, a faint heat that doesn’t belong to early morning. The hallway light draws me outward. I don’t register the sun immediately. I register temperature. The way it presses up through the floor into my feet, spreading as though the house has been awake for hours already. The air has the settled feel of a day midstream rather than a day beginning.

I step into the hallway and stop.

The sun is already high, bright enough to cast clean shadows and make the dust in the air visible. It isn’t climbing or peeking or testing the edges of the world. It is established. It has been here. My heart begins to beat faster, unevenly, as if my body is trying to make room for a conclusion my mind refuses to accept.

“That’s not right,” I say aloud. The words sound small against all that light.

I check my watch again. 5.45 a.m. Calm. Unbothered. As if it has no relationship with the window at all. The pressure behind my eyes deepens slightly, as if a headache is deciding whether it wants to exist today. I tell myself people misjudge light all the time and weather does strange things and bodies lie. I repeat it until it becomes a chant. Phones lie too, I add, because that is easier than admitting that my own senses might.

I choose the phone, because the phone at least gives me urgency and urgency gives me a script. In the bathroom, the tap water is colder than I expect, sharp against my skin. I splash my face and grip the sink until the faint dizziness passes. When I look up, my reflection seems delayed. Not a trick of sleep, not imagination. A small lag, like my face takes a moment to decide to become mine. My stomach twists, and then it aligns again, perfectly.

I blink hard and brush my teeth without meeting my own eyes for too long. I keep moving because stopping feels like inviting whatever this is to sit down beside me. Outside, the neighborhood hums with activity that doesn’t feel like a morning warming up. Traffic already has rhythm. Doors open and close mid-conversation. Someone laughs as if something has been funny for a while. I check my phone again as I step out.

8.47 a.m.

The number lands on my brain like a stamp. Official. Final. I walk faster.

At the bus stop, the digital display reads 8.23 a.m. Relief washes through me so suddenly my shoulders drop. “There you are,” I murmur, and I hate how grateful I sound to a machine. The bus arrives almost immediately, doors opening with a tired hiss, and I climb in with the obedient sense that if I follow the routine perfectly, the routine will forgive me.

Inside, the air feels thick and used, stale in a way that suggests many bodies have already passed through. I take a seat and press my forehead briefly against the cool glass, trying to steady myself. The headache is no longer subtle. It pulses behind my eyes in an imperfect rhythm with my heartbeat, and the ringing in my ears arrives like a thin wire tightening.

I start noticing screens without meaning to, as if my attention has been trained toward them by fear. A man across the aisle scrolls through his phone. 9.02 a.m. flashes briefly when he taps the status bar. A woman by the window checks her notifications. Her lock screen shows 6.33 a.m. She smiles at something and types calmly, like nothing is strange about the morning being early inside her hand. A teenager taps his watch twice, irritated. 10.11 a.m. He sighs like it’s the watch’s fault for being slow.

My mouth goes dry. The bus feels suddenly narrower. The air warmer. My fingers tingle at the tips, a faint buzzing that spreads up toward my wrists. I turn to the woman beside me and force my voice to stay casual, as if tone can control outcome.

“Sorry,” I say. “Do you know what time it is?”

She glances at me, then at her phone. “Seven forty-eight,” she says, like she’s answering what color the sky is.

“But the stop display said eight twenty-three,” I say, and I hear the sharpness in my own voice.

She shrugs. “Different system.”

“Different system,” I repeat. The phrase is absurd, and yet it’s delivered with such boredom it wants to become normal.

“Yeah,” she says, already looking away. “The buses are always off.”

Always off. I grip the edge of my seat until my knuckles go pale.

The bus lurches forward and nausea surges violently, fast enough to steal my breath. I swallow hard, but saliva floods my mouth, bitter and sudden. The ringing in my ears swells, high-pitched and insistent, making it difficult to focus on anything else. For a few seconds my vision sharpens too much, edges overdefined, as if the world is being rendered with the contrast turned up.

Then, as if to add insult, my phone in my palm grows warmer. Not battery-warm. Painfully warm. I shift it to my other hand. The heat follows, like it’s not the phone heating up but the time inside it.

By the time I get off, my hands are trembling. I tell myself it’s adrenaline. A migraine. Anything that keeps the explanation inside my body instead of outside it. I walk straight to the café because the smell of coffee is supposed to be an anchor, and anchors are what you reach for when you’re drifting.

The café bell rings when I push the door open. The smell hits me heavy and overused, like something brewed long before I arrived. Not fresh morning coffee. Coffee that has been sitting on a warmer too long, turning darker, thickening into something tired. The barista looks up and smiles in a way that is both familiar and strangely timed, like she has been expecting me but not in the way I expect.

“There you are,” she says.

I blink. “Sorry?”

“Missed your morning coffee, didn’t you,” she continues. “Never seen you come in after work.”

The words land wrong. My throat tightens around them. “After work?” I repeat, hearing the disbelief in my own voice. She studies my face more carefully now, her smile softening into concern.

“You okay? You look… you look really pale.”

“What time is it?” I ask, and it comes out too fast, too urgent, like a plea.

She glances at the register display. “Five thirty-seven.”

“AM?” I ask, already hating the way I sound.

She frowns. “PM.”

The room tilts, not violently, but enough to make me grab the counter. My heart begins to beat irregularly, too fast, then too slow, and I can feel the pulse in my fingertips. The ringing in my ears tightens again, and with it comes a sudden metallic taste, like I’ve bitten my tongue.

“I don’t feel well,” I say quietly, because that is the only sentence that still feels safe.

“Sit,” she says, stepping out from behind the counter. Her hand hovers near my elbow without touching, polite even in concern. “Do you want water? Should I call someone?”

I try to step back, misjudge the distance, and the floor seems to dip under my foot. Something warm runs down my nose. I touch it. My fingers come away red. Blood makes things real in the worst way, because it belongs to the body and bodies don’t lie without consequences.

“Jesus,” she mutters, then louder, steadier, “Clinic. Go to the clinic. Now. You’re not okay.”

I leave because I can’t sit under that fluorescent light with coffee air in my lungs while my head feels like it’s splitting open from the inside. Outside, the street stretches longer than it should. The pedestrian light changes too quickly, then lingers too long, like it can’t decide what phase it’s in. I pull my phone out again, wiping my nose with a tissue as I walk.

8.51 a.m.

The number makes no sense, and the confusion is thick now, moving through me like smoke. People pass me without slowing. No one looks around as if something is off. They move with the calm confidence of people whose days are arranged properly. Some of them check their watches and nod, satisfied, like the universe has met its obligation to them.

The clinic is closer than I remember, and that feels wrong too, as if distance is another thing that has stopped behaving. Inside, the lights buzz overhead, each hum pressing into my skull. The receptionist looks up.

“Name?”

I tell her.

She blinks. “Sorry. Again?”

I repeat it, slower this time, as if pronunciation will help her ears obey. She nods, but her eyes slide briefly toward the wall clock behind her, then back to me.

“Are you dizzy?” she asks.

“Yes,” I say, then hesitate because even the word feels uncertain. “I mean… kind of. I feel… off.”

“Take a seat.”

The plastic chair is cold against my legs. The waiting room television plays something cheerful at low volume, and a child laughs. The sound feels far away, like it belongs to a different timeline that still understands itself. My phone vibrates once. Not a call. Not a message. Just a single tremor, like a heartbeat skipping.

When the doctor calls my name, I stand too quickly and the room sways. She guides me into her office with professional gentleness and sits across from me with a clipboard, posture calm, practiced, the kind of calm people build like a wall.

“Tell me what’s going on,” she says.

I try to explain without sounding insane. I tell her I woke up feeling late. I felt dizzy. I had nausea on the bus. My ears have been ringing. I mention the nosebleed because blood makes symptoms believable and because I can still taste metal at the back of my throat. She asks about sleep, appetite, stress at work, caffeine intake. I answer mechanically, clinging to the normality of the questions.

She checks my pulse and frowns slightly, then checks again as if the first reading didn’t sit right. She shines a light in my eyes and asks me to follow her finger, and I do, though it feels like my eyes are moving through thick air.

“This could be a migraine,” she says carefully, as if offering me a rope. “Migraines can cause ringing in the ears, nausea, sensitivity to light, even confusion. Anxiety can also make these symptoms worse.”

“It doesn’t feel like anxiety,” I say, though I can hear how defensive I sound. “It feels like… I’m not lined up with the day.”

She pauses, pen hovering. “What do you mean by that?”

I hesitate, because saying it out loud feels like stepping onto thin ice. “I don’t know where I am in the day,” I admit. “I keep checking clocks. They’re not matching.”

She studies me for a moment, deciding where to place me. “Sometimes, when people are stressed, they lose track of time,” she says gently. “It can feel very disorienting.”

“It’s not that,” I say, and the urgency in my voice surprises me. “I’m not forgetting. I’m checking.”

She doesn’t argue. She nods once, the way you nod when you want someone to keep talking. “Okay,” she says. “Show me.”

My hands shake as I pull out my phone. My thumb slips the first time on the screen, like the glass is slick with too many minutes. The screen reads 8.59 a.m. The doctor leans forward, eyes narrowing slightly, not in fear but in concentration.

“Well, I think your watch is malfunctioning. It’s showing the wrong time”, she says.

“I know what it says and I’m not mad,” I snap, then soften immediately because I don’t want to become the kind of patient who needs calming. “Sorry. I just… listen. When did you last check the time?”

“My lunch break is twelve thirty to one thirty,” she says. “I came back about ten minutes ago.”

“So it should be around one forty,” I say quickly. “Right? Please. Can you check your laptop? Just tell me what it says.” She turns her laptop toward herself, casual, certain, expecting boredom. The screen shows 3.15 p.m. She doesn’t react at first. Then she blinks slowly, once, as if the laptop might correct itself out of embarrassment, and she looks down at her wristwatch.

12.27 p.m.

A small muscle jumps near her jaw. “That’s odd,” she says, and her voice is different. Not panicked. Just less certain. A knock comes at the door, bright and casual, as if nothing in the world could be more ordinary.

“Lunch?” a voice calls from the hallway. “Doctor, it’s time.”

The doctor doesn’t answer. My ears ring so loudly it hurts. Blood drips steadily onto the tissue in my hand. I press it tighter, and the pressure makes my eyes water. Outside the room, someone laughs. A microwave beeps. The clinic continues to exist around us as if it has never known confusion.

The doctor looks at her watch again, then at the laptop, then at me, and I can see the exact moment her training fails to produce a sentence. Her mouth opens as if to reassure me, then closes. The knock comes again, more insistent now, still cheerful.

“Doctor?”

She stays silent. My breathing becomes shallow without my permission, as if my body has decided deep breaths are too risky, that they might pull in more of whatever is in the room with us. The doctor finally reaches toward the tissue box and slides it closer to me, a small gesture that feels like an apology because it is the only thing she can offer.

Then, without anyone touching it, the laptop screen changes. The numbers flip once, neatly, like a clock trying to behave.

12.30 p.m.

I stare at it, stunned by the sudden obedience. I look at her watch. It still reads 12.27 p.m. The doctor doesn’t seem to notice the laptop’s change right away. Her eyes are fixed on the door now, as if waiting for it to open and deliver something she can name, something with a protocol.

The hallway is quiet. Too quiet. The laughter fades. The microwave stops. Footsteps retreat down the corridor like the building has decided to move away from us.

In that thin silence, my phone in my hand vibrates again. A single tremor. A pulse. The doctor clears her throat. When she speaks, her voice is careful, measured, as if she is stepping around a hole in the floor without looking directly at it.

“I’m going to take your blood pressure again,” she says. “And then we’ll run a few checks.”

I nod because nodding is easier than speaking. As she wraps the cuff around my arm, I glance past her at the bulletin board on the wall. Appointment reminders. Health pamphlets. A faded flyer that looks too official to be homemade.

TEMPORAL DISORIENTATION SUPPORT GROUP
EST. 2013

My stomach drops again, slow this time, like an elevator losing power. The cuff tightens around my arm until it hurts, until my fingers go cold. The doctor watches the gauge, trying to be a person who believes in stable readings. I sit there exhausted and nauseous, blood in my tissue, ringing in my ears, watching a professional who is trained to name things fail to name this one.

The door stays closed, and the silence that follows feels like the world holding its breath. For the first time, the fear isn’t about being late to work. It’s the colder fear underneath it: the fear that time is no longer something we share. It’s something we negotiate.

And somewhere, just outside the room, something has decided not to negotiate with me anymore.

 

Reviews

[JayG]

This works for you because the narrator is talking about things for which you have context asyou begin reading. And because you are the narrator, you hear the emotion in their voice that the reader can’t know to place there.

And, because you’re talking TO the reader, as against living the events in your mind, you don’t catch obvious probems. Look at a single point:

• The device is warm against my palm. Not just warm like it’s been charging, but warm like skin.

This person just woke to find the phone clutched in their hand and no memory of why they're there, and they’re noticing that it’s as warm as their hand, first? Seriously? That’s what they focus on? The temperature of the phone? Naaa.

And look at a few lines but as a reader must—a reader who does NOT know: our gender, age, background, back-story, or ANYTHING but that they woke in an unknown place that’s “half-dark.”

• I stare at the numbers, waiting for them to shift.

I just picked up my phone. It has a picture, the date, and, other data, plus, the time. But while the numbers will change if I wait long enough, they NEVER shift. And if you meant the person was waiting for the minute to change, that makes no sense, given their surprise at waking there, and, an urgent need to understand.

If I woke like that, the very first thing I would do is determine where I am, which this person doesn’t do. So how can they seem real?

• The digits remain steady and clean, finished in a way that makes my throat tighten.

Okay, I’m lost. Unless we know what about them is unique, the statement is meaningless. You're giving reaction without cause.

Of most importance, you are NOT in the protagonist’s viewpoint. You’re talking ABOUT them. There is no difference between the author talking about the events and the author pretending that the events once happened to them. Either way, the story can have no immediacy because it’s all secondhand information, presented in the lifeless voice of an external observer.

My point? To write fiction you need the skills of fiction writing—the skills the pros depend on. Think about it. For hundreds of years, writers have been finding out what works and what doesn’t. If you don’t profit from all that work you are going to accidentally rediscover them, one-by-one—never noticing that it happens.

You can see why digging into those skills and making them yours makes a LOT of sense.

And bear in mind, that the problem is one you share with nearly all hopeful writers, because we leave school believing that we learned to write, and that writing-is-writing. But...remember all the reports you were assigned? They readied you for the reports, letters, and other NONFICTION that employers need. But they did NOT prepare you for writing fiction, which has an entirely different objective. Nonfiction informs, but fiction entertains, and so, needs a methodology that’s emotion, not fact-based.

So...grab a copy of Debra Dixon’s GMC: Goal Motivation & Conflict, and dig in. You’ll be very glad you did.

https://dokumen.pub/qdownload/gmc-goal-motivation-and-conflict-9781611943184.html

Jay Greenstein
Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334