The alley was quiet—too quiet. The kind of silence that felt staged, as if the world had paused to observe her disorientation. Mia stood at its center, one hand clutching the leather strap of her bag, the other still frozen mid-turn over the pages of her planner.
They were blank.
Her fingers trembled as she traced the ghost of pencil lines that should've marked appointments, reminders, and careful interventions. But the squares—seven wide, five deep—were stark. Emptier than they should be. Emptier than she could explain.
She blinked hard. Once. Twice.
Nothing changed.
Above her, the yellow flicker of a streetlamp buzzed unevenly, the light casting long shadows from a stack of milk crates and a trash bin smeared with graffiti. The pavement was damp, reflecting shards of moonlight as if it, too, held fragments she couldn't grasp.
She turned a page.
Nothing.
The dates were written, yes. In her own handwriting. But there were no notes. No annotations. No arrows looping from one day to another. No red-ink alerts. Just numbers, quietly accusing her of absence.
How had she lost time?
She backed against the brick wall, cold pressing into her spine. Panic coiled like smoke in her chest, rising hot behind her eyes. Mia squeezed the planner shut and held it tight to her chest as if doing so might conjure answers.
Think.
What was the last entry?
She opened the front pocket of her bag and pulled out a pen, fingers fumbling. She uncapped it and, breathing slowly, drew a dot on the lower corner of the blank square—today's date.
The ink worked.
So she was here.
She hadn't vanished.
But something else had.
She moved slowly down the alley, each step echoing against stone and metal. Her boots clipped past old posters peeling from the walls, past an overturned crate she didn't remember passing before. The alley opened to a cross street lined with shuttered storefronts. A neon "OPEN" sign flickered in defiance from a corner bodega. She made no move toward it.
Instead, she stopped beneath a broken fire escape and stared up at the rusted ladder. Familiar. Unfamiliar.
What had she forgotten?
What had she been meant to remember?
A gust of wind lifted the edge of her coat. She hugged the planner closer, flipping it open again.
That's when she saw it.
Not in her handwriting.
Tucked into the corner of next Tuesday's square, in smudged ink that had seeped through faintly to the following page:
"6:45PM - Booth 9."
She didn't write that.
Her breath hitched. She ran her thumb across the words. No indentation. As if it had been written quickly. With urgency. And then closed before drying.
Who wrote it?
Where was Booth 9?
Mia's pulse thudded in her ears. Her first instinct was to tear the page out, to remove the foreign ink from her careful record. But something stopped her. A flicker in her chest. Not fear. Something like…
Recognition.
Or the memory of it.
She flipped back two pages. A name? A marker? Nothing. She turned ahead. Three pages. Four. Blank. Then, faintly, another scribble—upside down in the margin of a Thursday.
"Check the envelope."
No envelope was marked.
She reached into her bag. Planner. Pen. Snack bar. Mini flashlight. Folded map. Loose change. The usual. But as her fingers brushed a soft edge, her heartbeat lurched.
An envelope.
Unsealed. Unlabeled.
She drew it out slowly, as though fearing it might disintegrate on contact.
Inside was a slip of paper. Typewritten. She recognized the font from the typewriter she'd borrowed weeks ago. But the alignment was off, the ribbon dark in places and faded in others:
"You left this for yourself. Trust that."
Mia sat down heavily on the low brick ledge. Her mind raced.
Had she done this? Had she planted reminders because she knew this would happen?
The blackouts.
They weren't new. But this—this was different. This was orchestrated.
She placed the envelope beside her on the ledge. The planner on her lap. The smudged ink at the corner of Tuesday's square glared up at her.
6:45PM - Booth 9.
She didn't know what it meant.
But something in her bones told her she'd known once.
That was enough.
She underlined it. Once. Firmly.
Then, in her own script, added beneath it:
"—Be present. Even if you forget why."
The planner felt heavier now. As if it remembered more than she did.
She closed it gently. Stood.
And walked back into the light.
The air outside the alley held a faint electricity, the kind that precedes a storm or an answer. Mia's footsteps sounded too loud on the sidewalk, but she didn't slow them. Her gaze swept over parked cars, dimly lit windows, the blinking red eye of a security camera angled toward a convenience store entrance.
Everything looked ordinary.
But everything felt wrong.
She stopped near a bus shelter and leaned her back against the glass. The route map beside her was smeared with fingerprints. Old chewing gum clung to the base. Her reflection looked faint, doubled. She lifted the planner and saw the page again—Booth 9, like a challenge.
A direction.
A promise.
From the pocket of her coat, she pulled the envelope again. The paper inside crackled in the wind. She flipped it over. On the back, faint pencil impressions—just three words, half-erased.
"Look for signal."
That was all.
She stared at it, then turned it back. You left this for yourself. The words repeated themselves in her thoughts until they no longer sounded like a message, but a memory.
She had left this. Not because she'd failed to remember, but because she'd known she would.
Trust that.
And somehow, she did.
She slipped the envelope back into her bag, brushing her fingers along the edge as if sealing a pact.
The street stretched out before her, empty but alive. Somewhere out there was Booth 9. A time. A meeting. Maybe with herself. Maybe with something else she had forgotten to name.
The moon had risen higher now, casting the sidewalk in a softer kind of clarity. She turned the corner, her shadow pulling long behind her. In a storefront window, a digital clock blinked 6:17.
Close.
She didn't run.
She walked.
Deliberately.
Each step placed like an invocation. A reclamation.
She didn't know what she would find at Booth 9. But the planner was tucked under her arm again, the page already creased at the corner, her own handwriting anchoring the strange mark someone else—or maybe another version of herself—had left behind.
Be present.
Even if you forget why.