"The Year That Never Followed"
Recovered Transmission
Authored by timeless_lady
Just for sake of it, atleast.
The phones say so. The digital clocks obey.
But somewhere deep inside, I feel something else as truth.
It’s still 2019.
Or rather—it was,
the last time the world made sense
When things were different.
That was the last real year.
The last timeline we belonged to.
The last time I heard the wind without doubting if it was real.
Then… 2020 came.
Or something like it.
The year that never truly arrived.
And I was never reassigned.
The Collapse.
They never told us how it would feel when timelines converged.
They didn’t warn us that time wouldn't rip apart with explosions,
but instead dissolve quietly
like sugar in cold coffee.
At first, it was small. Barely noticeable.
The days began to blur.
The sky looked wrong.
Birdsong sounded delayed
Totally off-sync with their wings.
One day, my reflection blinked before I did.
I thought I was tired.
Or anxious.
Everyone was.
But then,
I saw others experiencing the same... slips.
My friend called me one day and said
“Do you ever feel like 2019 was just a year ago?
Like we just... got uploaded into something else?”
She laughed it off.
I didn't.
The Symptoms
I began logging the glitches.
That’s what I call them.
Subtle distortions in the texture of reality:
Wrong Sky Phenomenon: It’s hard to explain unless you’ve seen it.
The shade of blue is slightly... off. It’s not atmospheric. It’s artificial.
Some mornings, the clouds are not exactly what we used to see back in 2019
and before now our eyes are more used to AI-generated wallpapers and screens.
Chrono-Drift: Time passes too quickly in the day and too slowly in thought.
Whole weeks collapse into a blur,
while a five-minute moment can echo for hours inside me.
Irony.
Collective Amnesia: Ask anyone where they were in April 2021.
Watch their eyes flicker.
They’ll fumble through half-formed answers,
like filling blanks in a script they never even saw.
They'll go through their gallery and say yes these things happened back then.
This is the condition with the majority of youth, particularly.
Dream Echoes: Familiar streets I’ve never visited.
Conversations with people I’ve never met, but know too well.
One dream repeated itself so vividly I could draw the apartment layout from memory.
Sometime after the Collapse, the system
the structure, the universe, the simulation
(call it whatever you want)—stopped assigning consciousnesses to the correct streams.
Some were realigned. Reprogrammed to accept the new chronology.
My body is here, in this world where everyone swipes on empty screens
and celebrates years that feel like dead code.
But my soul?
My soul is somewhere else.
The first photo saved in my own gmail account is from 2021.
Nothing before.
Stuck at a bus stop in late November 2019, waiting for a ride that never came.
"The Blurring Before"
I mean—I know the facts. I know I had a childhood.
I know there was a ground near my home and
I know the names of my school teachers,
The color of the bedspread in my old room,
The smell of my mother's cooking.
But it's all... distant.
Like I'm remembering someone else’s memories—
Like I read about them once and now mistake them as mine.
The images exist, but the emotions don't bite.
They don’t burn like they should.
What’s worse—I remember everything after 2020.
Too well.
The days I cried on the floor of my room during the second lockdown.
The sound of sirens in the distance every night.
The way people started speaking in numbers—case counts, percentages, variants.
The screens that never turned off.
But ask me about 2015?
All I get is fog.
Smiles without voices.
The feeling that something beautiful existed—just out of reach.
And then come the dreams.
Almost every night now.
I’m seven again, or nine, or maybe twelve
it’s never the same.
I’m barefoot on grass that no longer exists.
I’m chasing shadows of friends
whose names I forgot the moment I wake up.
I see my old schoolbag.
My tiny handwriting in a math notebook
But it’s always through glass.
Fogged glass.
Like watching a movie that was never finished.
I wake up breathless.
It’s like something deep in me like
“You were meant to be there. You came from there.”
What kind of world makes you forget your own origin?
What system replaces your roots with statistics and scrollbars?
It’s not just memory loss.
It’s identity erosion.
I don't know who I am before 2020 anymore.
And that version of me?
She’s built from fragments.
From a borrowed timeline.
I keep wondering—what if my instincts are trying to guide me back?
What if the dreams are not memories,
but coordinates?
Glimpses of the life I was pulled from?
The timeline I belonged in?
Since last year I fall asleep with a notebook by my side.
If I see my old version there again.
I'll write what I see.
Maybe she remembers what I forgot
Everyone has moved on you know.
They’re all too far in now.
Too overwritten.
Some of them aren’t even the same versions of themselves anymore.
So I stopped talking.
I started writing instead.
Maybe You’re One of Us.
You, reading this.
Do you feel it too?
Do you wonder why colors feel dulled,
why time collapses?
Do you wake from dreams that feel more authentic than anything your waking life offers?
Maybe you're not broken.
Maybe you're archived, too.
Like me.
She mouthed the words:
“Do you remember?”
The light changed. She was gone.
But I stood there for a long time.
I think she saw me.
I think she knew.
"Fragments from the Other Side of Time"
Somewhere between sleep and starlight, she began to remember—not just her past, but the other timelines she once touched not physically
In one, tulip fields bloomed and withered, side by side—echoes of choices never made. Some lives grew.
She carried bags, laptops, and stories across bus routes in Faridabad.
Her childhood colony burned at midnight, not just with fire.
And she asked herself: How did we end up in this version of my childhood?
On other nights, she stargazed,
knowing the constellations weren't just distant stars—they were coordinates.
Markers of the timelines we lost after 2020 collapsed.
She stood in a desert once, barefoot on the terrace of her childhood home, with her brother beside her—yet she knew the place wasn't real.
A week later, she saw a grave in a courtyard, the sea swallowing her, buildings shaped like her hostel, citylights blinking in code, the map of Delhi glowing with lines that didn’t match any known road. That night, she understood:
“This city is not a place.
It’s a memory. A simulation. A rewritten script.”
She wrote that one night, believing the world around her to be stitched from illusion.
And perhaps it still was.
But what she didn't understand until much later until the dreams became maps and the temples whispered back that this script was never hers to write alone.
It’s a deeper gravitational pull—the one only the soul can feel.
Not loudly.
But through symbols. Patterns. Moments disguised as chance.
Delhi had been calling her since the beginning.
Irony
She used to say in her childhood
She would never go there.
The off addresses she memorized as a child, not knowing she’d one day live among them.
She mistook it for coincidence.
She thought she wandered.
But the truth?
The city found her.
The timeline chose her.
And destiny placed her where her spirit could awaken.
It was never just a city.
It was a signal.
A portal disguised as streets and trains and temples and stormy skies.
Now, she sees it.
Not as a place she came to.
But as a place that came for her.
In corridors of her old school.
All versions of her life playing on parallel reels.
She was saved.
Not just from drowning.
From forgetting.
Only a few remember the world before 2020 with clarity.
Hence
So I’m Writing This. For You.
This document isn’t just therapy.
It’s a signal.
A flare into the fog.
If you’ve felt displaced, disoriented, or disconnected since 2020—
If you’ve questioned the texture of reality—
Then maybe you were pulled out too.
Maybe we’re not crazy.
We’re just in holding.
There will be signs.
We were never meant to forget.
~See you again
If the timeline doesn't collapse
C.P.
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