Page 14 of Time Loops & Meet Cutes
“I assume you’ve attempted to get out of the loop,” she says. “What have you tried?”
“One night, I stayed up as long as I could. It appears the reset time is three in the morning, because all of a sudden, I found myself back in bed, waking up to my alarm. On the twentieth.”
“Oh! I never thought to try that. The dumpling lady… did she tell you that the dumplings would give you what you needed most?”
“She did,” I say. “And I was hungry. I needed food.”
Avery laughs. She has a booming laugh.
“Is it your birthday too?” she asks.
“What? No. It’s yours?”
She nods. “When I was a kid, I’d have thought reliving my birthday would be great fun, but it’s not so fun when your boyfriend forgets about it.”
“And now you have to relive him forgetting over and over.”
“Exactly. It’s awful.”
“I can imagine. I wonder if anyone else is stuck in this loop with us?”
“I don’t know,” she says, “but I’m very glad to have you found you. I couldn’t talk to anyone else about it. Even if I got someone to believe me—”
“You’d have to explain it again tomorrow.”
“Yeah. Tomorrow. Whatever that even means now.”
I can’t remember the last time I clicked with someone I just met, but these are unusual circumstances—though aren’t friendships often about circumstance? You know, the people who happen to be in your class when you’re a kid. As you get older…
Well, I’ve struggled to make friends as an adult. I’m not close with any of my coworkers.
“I still don’t understand how we got into this mess,” I say. “This woman made magical dumplings that can make you repeat the day you ate them?”
“Or maybe they do different things for different people, and they caused the time loop for us because that’s what we need most.”
“But why?Whywould someone need to live the same day over and over?”
“Maybe,” she says, “there’s something we each have to do that will get us out of the loop, and what each of us needed was another chance at the day.”
“It was a pretty ordinary day for me. Stayed at the office late, ate dumplings, went home.”
“Well, as I said, it’s my birthday. When I reminded Joe—my boyfriend—about it, he sent me an e-card. An e-card! I complained about his lack of effort, and I got a speech about how celebrating your birthday when you’re over twenty-five is childish and embarrassing.”
“How long have you been together?” I ask.
“Three years.”
“Do you live together?”
“Yeah.”
This is one thing that Avery and I don’t have in common. But as we continue to talk, it becomes clear that there are lots of similarities. We both have steady jobs but don’t have much going on in our lives other than our work. We’re both the oldest of allour siblings. We both grew up in the Toronto area. We both enjoy reading—at least, I’ve rediscovered the joy of reading now that I have more free time. It sounds like she’s a voracious bookworm.
“I admit I’m a bit of a workaholic,” I say. “I don’t like doing anything but my best, and sometimes it feels like, because I’m so competent, they just keep piling more stuff on me, knowing I’ll get it done. But I’ve stopped working, and clearly that didn’t get me out of this situation.”
Avery taps her finger against her chin. “We have to figure out what the dumpling lady would want us to change about our lives.”
“Except we don’t know her at all, and she doesn’t know us.”
