The Paradoxical Pocket Watch
The rain tasted of burnt sugar and regret. Not the cloying sweetness of a forgotten dessert, but the bitter, caramelized tang of causality collapsing in on itself. I checked the pocket watch again. Still 11:57. Still ticking backwards. Still my damnation.
I found it glinting in the alley, nestled between a discarded newspaper and a broken umbrella. An antique, heavy silver, with intricate engravings depicting ouroboros – snakes devouring their own tails. A cliché, I know. But clichés exist for a reason; they capture fundamental truths. This one captured my unraveling.
The first time it happened, I’d dismissed it as a hallucination. A flicker in the periphery. A brief disorientation. But the second time…the second time, I saw the cat leap out of the garbage can, scattering the refuse before it rummaged through it. Time, like a film reel, was spooling backwards, frame by agonizing frame.
I clutched the pocket watch tighter. The silver burned my palm, a physical manifestation of the temporal fire consuming my life. Each backward tick eroded a piece of my present, replacing it with a distorted echo of my past. Memories flickered, faces blurred, and conversations unspooled in reverse.
The Loop Tightens
My research led me down labyrinthine paths of forgotten theories and esoteric texts. Time, it turned out, wasn’t a river. It was a Mobius strip. A closed loop. And I, through the agency of this infernal device, was trapped on its surface.
I tried to destroy it. Smashed it with a hammer. Submerged it in acid. Threw it into a raging bonfire. Each attempt failed. The watch emerged unscathed, its backward ticking a mocking metronome counting down to my inevitable erasure.
The world around me continued to disintegrate. Buildings rebuilt themselves from rubble. Cars un-crashed. People un-said words, their lips moving in reverse, their expressions shifting from sorrow to joy, from anger to placidity. The rain, always the rain, tasting increasingly of burnt sugar and the ghost of what was, or would be.
I understood then. The pocket watch wasn’t a cause. It was a symptom. The timeline itself was fractured, broken into a million shards of potentiality. The watch was merely a focal point, a lens through which I could witness the unraveling.
My apartment, once a sanctuary, now felt like a prison. The familiar furniture rearranged itself nightly, objects vanishing and reappearing, each shift a subtle betrayal of my sanity. My reflection in the mirror grew younger with each passing day, the lines of worry and experience fading, replaced by the smooth, unblemished face of a boy I no longer recognized.
Acceptance and Oblivion
There was only one solution, a terrifyingly simple act of acceptance. I had to let go. Stop fighting the current. Allow myself to be swept away by the backward tide. I sat on the fire escape, the rain plastering my hair to my forehead, the city lights blurring into a hazy kaleidoscope. The pocket watch ticked relentlessly, its backward cadence a lullaby of oblivion.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and waited. The rain intensified, the burnt sugar taste becoming almost unbearable. And then…nothing. A complete and utter cessation of being. Not death, but something far stranger. An un-birth. An erasure from the very fabric of existence.
The pocket watch remained in the alley, glinting under the streetlights. Waiting for its next victim. Ticking backwards. Eternally.
