The Internet Is Always Helpful And Kind

Can you believe I thought the internet would be my salvation? Can you believe that I actually turned to it for answers? After the life I’ve lived and the places I’ve been and the things I’ve seen on it?

Well, here’s the thing. It might have actually worked. I know. I’m as surprised as anyone.

I opened up my laptop and set to work, first of all starting by re-familiarizing myself with how the internet used to work. The internet I was used to working with was well over a decade into the future and so half the sites I would have gone to didn’t even exist yet or if they did, they didn’t work the same way or do the same things.

But I managed. I’d spent enough time on the internet in these years of my life that I was more than capable on it and I did eventually remember how to navigate through the damn thing.

Going from news sites into individual web rings and finally from there to obscure message boards until I found the final piece of the puzzle. Until I confirmed my suspicions.

I wasn’t the first person this had happened to.

My answers came on a message board about alternate realities. It was, near as I could tell, the beginning of discussions about the Mandela effect. The earliest rumblings about it that happened before the first incidents involving children’s books and mistakenly dead world leaders kicked off. This group was much smaller, but far more vehement in their beliefs.

But they were ultimately irrelevant to me. What I needed was buried in a subpage of a subpage and it was a single post from a person who wanted to know whether anyone else had ever jumped realities.

And on that page they told their story hoping to exchange it for much needed answers.

“I was in a bad place,” they explained, “Down a rabbit hole of self doubt and self hatred. That was when I stumbled on the traveling circus that didn’t feel quite real. It was walking home one day and I turned the corner and they were there and they just felt so familiar. I knew where to go. My feet knew where to go. They knew how to lead me to her.

“She was in a tent and it was smokey on the inside, like the place was filled with stale incense. She talked for a long time and she asked me a lot of questions and I can barely only remember half of them but I remember that she told me she could give me a second chance.

“One minute I was there and the next I was waking up in a different body back in my own past. Near as I can figure I’ve been pushed back through my timeline but the life I’m in is both mine and not mine and I don’t know what to do with it.

“It’s been weeks now and I’ve been searching for answers. I think I might be close to finding her.

“Someone else has to have gone through this, right? Someone out here has to have felt this? It’s been so hard some days. I keep feeling these odd feelings, like the body I’m in is both mine and not mine, you know? I keep on feeling this… excitement, I guess. I don’t really know if that’s the right word.

“But I don’t know what else to call it. Things feel different now. They feel electrifying. Everything feels so much more intense, like all my senses are dialed up to eleven. Everything. Everything is so different now.

“Including me.”

I signed up for an account on that message board and fired off a message to them, noticing only afterwards that they hadn’t logged on in nearly a year. Their username was unique, at least, and I made a quick note of it hoping that if I pursued them I might be able to find them other places.

Sw1tch3d-1. They called themselves Sw1tch3d-1.

Time was running out right now. If I did want to go to the mixer tonight, and I actually did, then I’d need to go about getting ready. But as I snapped off my computer their words still lingered. Especially the final bit, the way that things felt different now.

I think I’d been feeling it for a while now, trying to deny it maybe but not fully able to. I’d sensed it when I was in the bathroom at the bus station, when I was trying to figure out how far the changes went.

This new body, it did feel different. It felt so much… So much more than ever before.

And now I finally had the privacy to fully explore what that meant.

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