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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/RaynaClay on 2024-10-13 18:08:04+00:00.

I was 11 when doorways… broke. I mean ‘broke’ in the sense that they no longer consistently worked the way doorways are supposed to. It’s hard to explain. It started with little things. The first time I remember something strange happening, I had walked from the kitchen into the living room and as I passed the threshold, suddenly there was this vase of flowers on the table that I was sure hadn’t been there the moment before. They were large, bright sunflowers and I had no idea how I could have missed them, but they were clearly there, and so I figured I just hadn’t been paying attention. I was only 11, after all. Everything else seemed fine. I put it out of my head.

After that day, however, similar things started to happen more frequently. Or maybe I just noticed them more. Mostly it was little things. I would follow my mom through a door and suddenly she was wearing a different shirt than she had been a moment ago. Or her hairstyle had changed. One notable time it was suddenly dyed fiery red, when it had been its usual brown before we left the house. I would search everywhere for my favorite stuffed animal, only to find it sitting in its normal place on my bed when I gave up and went back to my room. I would go downstairs to watch my favorite show, only to be told that it always aired on Thursdays, not Fridays even though I was certain of the timing. That sort of thing happened so often that my parents began to worry that something was wrong with my memory. They took me to a series of specialists and had a bunch of tests done, but if anything, they found that my memory was better than average. The conversation then shifted to discussions about hallucinations and a possible psychiatric diagnosis. At that point, I pretty much stopped mentioning when something unusual happened. But that didn’t mean the incidents stopped. For a long time, I just tried to pretend nothing was wrong. It was easy as long as the changes were small. But occasionally, something shifted that was difficult to ignore. Not just a missing item, or a different colored shirt, but a change that mattered to me. One that hurt.

The first time that happened I was 16. I had just started dating my first real boyfriend. He was a sweet guy named Shawn from my homeroom class and we had gone on several dates. The morning it happened, I woke up to get ready for school and noticed that the bracelet he gave me the week before was missing. I was sure I had left it on my desk yesterday, but I realized I hadn’t checked for it after I entered my room to get ready for bed. I cursed, knowing something must have shifted the last time I entered the room. I wasn’t sure how I was going to explain that to Shawn, but I hoped he would understand. I had a reputation for misplacing things and being absent minded, so it wouldn’t really be a surprise. I showed up a bit early to school, hoping to talk to him alone, but when I got to his locker, he was there with Shannon McGuire. I remember the way he smiled, then leaned in and kissed her. Bracelet forgotten, I stormed over and demanded to know how long he had been cheating on me. The fact that we had only been dating for about a month really limited the possibilities, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. Shawn just looked at me with genuine confusion and asked what I was talking about. He and Shannon had been exclusive for a full year, in fact today was their anniversary. Shannon showed off her bracelet with a sneer, apparently concluding that I was simply delusional and pathetic, having some imaginary relationship with her boyfriend. At least I knew why the bracelet wasn’t on my desk.

I went home sick from school that day. I cried all afternoon but wouldn’t tell my parents what was wrong. They wouldn’t have understood, anyway. How could they? How could I ever explain that for me, every doorway had at least a small chance of depositing me in the room I was aiming for, but in an alternate reality, where things were somewhat different from the one I had been in only moments before. Mostly, these alternate realities were close enough that it was hard to even notice the differences, but not always. Most concerningly, I had no control over when this happened, or what changed, and no way to tell how many times I had accidentally slipped between realities since all this started. I often wonder what my life is like in the reality I came from originally, but I don’t even know where that place is. The only things I can be sure won’t change or disappear whenever I cross a threshold are the things I have on my person. Those travel with me, but for everything else, all bets are off. Unfortunately, that is also true for people.

The weekend of my 21st birthday I travelled home from university to visit my parents. That was a tough time in my life, honestly. I was still coming to terms with how my… condition was going to affect the rest of my life. I had already started calculating the most efficient path of travel in every situation, to minimize door crossings in my day-to-day life. I was careful to never double back and if I forgot something in my room, well I would just have to do without it for the day. It helped, but in modern society, you can’t really avoid all doorways. This meant that, despite my efforts, there was a decent chance that any assignment I turned in was at least partially incorrect because the questions had changed subtly between when I received it and when I handed it in. I also missed a lot of tests when scheduling changes occurred and flaked on a lot of ‘plans’ I had made with people. As a result, I hadn’t made many friends at school, and those I did manage to make had a nasty tendency to forget that I even existed at random intervals. So, I was very glad to be home with people who loved me and were mostly used to my… odd behavior.

I slept in late on Saturday morning, and when I came down for breakfast, something was wrong. My mom had made banana pancakes for my birthday every year for as long as I could remember, but this year there was nothing cooking when I came down. I will admit I was disappointed, but these types of changes happened to me so often that I was also kind of used to it. So, I simply headed to the pantry to make some myself and found a strange woman emerging with a can of beets. I said hello cautiously, and she smiled, wished me a happy birthday and slipped past me into the kitchen. She seemed to know me, so I figured my parents must have a ‘new’ friend. It wasn’t the first time that had happened, so I didn’t think much of it. Until I returned to the kitchen with my pancake ingredients to find her sitting with my dad, her hand touching his cheek in a way that was clearly intimate. My dad smiled and wished me a happy birthday, but I barely heard him. Part of me already knew what had happened, and I knew I shouldn’t say anything about it. It wouldn’t end well. But I just couldn’t stop myself from asking where mom was. I watched my father’s face fall. I heard him remind me, with pity in his voice, that she had died 5 years ago. That surely I remembered my stepmother, Veronica. I didn’t stay to hear any more.

No one understood why I was suddenly grieving for my mother as if her death had only just occurred. Certainly no one understood why I spent 2 days continually walking in and out of rooms, back and forth across the threshold until I collapsed. It didn’t work. Maybe there was no way to go back. Maybe the odds were just so low that it would never practically happen. Either way, it took me a long time, but I came to accept that my mom was truly gone. It helped to know that somewhere out there, she was still alive, living her life, even if I can’t be there with her. It also helped to think that there is a version of me that woke up that day to find that their mother was suddenly alive again. I just hope it isn’t the ‘me’ I am worried it is.

You know how people say you are often your own worst enemy? I think that may be more literal for me than for some people. More than once, after a shift, I have found signs that something… unsettling has happened before I arrived. I don’t know if that is because I am always following behind the same person, or if many versions of myself have broken, like the doorways, under the strain of our shared situation. All I know is that sometimes I think I have done terrible things. It’s frustrating, because there isn’t really anything I can do to stop it. I just have to follow in behind and clean up the mess. Deal with the angry spouses, or the vandalism charges or the lawsuits. Which means I don’t just have to worry about the universe screwing me over, but another version of myself, too.

There wasn’t much I could do though. So, I just tried to manage my condition as best as I could. I avoided getting too close to anyone, because there is no way to tell if they will even know me tomorrow, or if ‘I’ will do something to hurt them. I even pulled away from my family. My dad thinks I developed a sudden dislike of my stepmother, Monica, and it isn’t like I could explain that that isn’t the problem, or that I liked Veronica better. He doesn’t even remember who Veronica was. I also started carrying everything most precious to me in a small backpack everywhere I go. Anything I don’t have on me could disappear at any time. So, I guess you can probably imagine that I have a pretty minimalist lifestyle. I live in a studio apartment, I work from home, order most of my groceries deliver…

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