Michael goes over the short memory again. Some details are sharp (an impossible amount of dust spinning, disrupted, in the wedge of sun) while many others just won’t resolve into fact no matter how hard he concentrates. The scene seems isolated: one warped sliver left over from a shredded reel of film.
“I wanna know who it was,” he says to himself, halfway between worlds. “At the door. It’s like I was waiting. Like it wasn’t the only time.”
Something about his own words stops him, makes him cautiously rewind.
“But it’s always that same… It always looks the same, I can’t tell how the time passed. I don’t know how I got in there, how old I was—I have a fake birthday, I don’t even know if my age is right, It could be my twenty-eighth birthday this year for all anyone knows.
“The point is, what if… what if it wasn’t the only time? What if the door opened twenty different times, and it always looked the same, and I remember them all but I just can’t tell the difference?”
The familiar feeling of sick, icy-hot panic starts to bloom in his chest. Shit, shit. He can’t do this. He can see himself failing at doing this. It’s imminent.