Every time I fall asleep, one year passes until I wake up again. It started on my 18th birthday. That night was ordinary—cake with too-sweet frosting, laughter echoing off the kitchen walls, a wish made over flickering candles I barely remember. I went to bed thinking about college applications and crushes, about leaving town and starting something new. I closed my eyes with the weightless hope of youth and opened them to find the calendar read June 20, 2024.

My room was dustier. The posters on the wall had faded to ghosts of their former selves. The vines outside my window had crept deeper into the cracks of the siding, pulling the house back toward the earth. I stumbled into the kitchen, heart pounding, and found news clippings on the fridge: Local Teen Still Missing, Presumed Dead. My name. My face. My family frozen in an old photo, smiling like we hadn’t yet fractured. I thought it was a dream. It had to be. But then I blinked—and the world spun forward again.

I’ve tried everything—staying awake for days, flooding my body with caffeine until my hands shook, tying myself to doorframes, sleeping in hospital lights. But it always comes. That moment when my body betrays me. When exhaustion wins. And when I wake… the world is one year older.

My parents grieved, then grew distant. My mother’s hair grayed, my father’s eyes dulled. My friends moved on, their lives arcing forward while mine stuttered like a skipped record. Technology surged ahead. Fashion shifted. The slang changed. Seasons lost their rhythm—summer felt like winter, spring was hot and wrong. The sun started rising at odd angles, like even it was tired of keeping time.

By my twenty-fifth wake-up, the world had grown quieter. Cities had begun to erode. Streets cracked and were swallowed by roots. Trees leaned harder into broken buildings. My childhood home was boarded up, condemned. I wandered the neighborhood like a ghost until a neighbor—one of the few who hadn’t moved or died—spotted me.

“You haven’t aged a day,” he whispered, backing away like I was a specter. “They say you’re cursed.”

He wasn’t wrong. Eventually, I stopped trying to explain. You can only tell someone you’re a walking paradox so many times before the disbelief calcifies into fear. Instead, I began to plan my years like missions. I left letters in library books, hid instructions in vaults only I knew how to open, buried messages under stone. I studied languages. I watched how the world tilted—how solar flares impacted climate, how artificial intelligence reshaped the economy, how the sky itself sometimes flickered. I learned to garden. Not because I’d ever see the bloom, but because I wanted to leave something living behind.

Then, on my thirty-second wake-up, I met Aria. She was standing in front of an abandoned bookstore, painting a mural of a phoenix wrapped in clock gears. I watched her for an hour before she turned and said, “You look lost. Or late.”

She believed me—without flinching. Called me her Rip Van Winkle with a clockwork heart. She asked questions no one had before: What do you miss the most? Have you ever left something behind on purpose?

That day, we built a capsule together—filled it with pieces of our lives: her sketchbook, a photo of us, my notebook scrawled with maps of possible futures. We buried it under the old bell tower, sealing it with a promise: if we found each other again, we’d dig it up.

The next time I woke, she was gone. Only a note remained, brittle and faded like old leaves: If you ever wake again, find me in Florence. That was twenty-four wake-ups ago.

I’ve searched across continents. Florence, Italy first—then Florence, Oregon. Every Florence I could find. Some didn’t exist anymore. Some had changed their names. But I searched anyway. I asked about her in dusty towns and sleek arcologies. I studied old security footage, traced murals, found fragments of the phoenix in back alleys and gallery ruins.

I’m almost seventy now, though I still look eighteen. My bones don’t ache, but my soul does. I’ve watched decades pass by the handful. I’ve outlived my friends, my parents, and the future I once imagined. But I haven’t stopped searching for her.

Tonight, as my eyes grow heavy, I hold her last note to my chest. The ink is nearly gone, but I’ve memorized every letter. I whisper her name like a prayer, willing my dreams to hold steady. Because maybe—just maybe—next year will be the one I find her. Or maybe next time I wake, the world will finally stop spinning without me.