The cracks in my rose-tinted glasses

Wednesday

A room.

Small, yet comforting, with the last of the dying light trickling in through the windows.

It was her room.

Medium-sized, nothing special. But it was hers, and that was what mattered. And that was also what didn't make any sense.

Her life. Her room. Her dad.

Danny had already dropped her back off at home and it had again been every bit as awkward and quiet as before. Her dad was still at work. The same work. The normal work. The work that had forced them to have to move all the way from Canada to the UK.

How come she still had her life, her house and her dad and yet- And yet somehow at the same time she didn't.

It wasn't something that you would notice if you weren't looking. Little things, small enough that if Morgan had not gone to school that day and just read a book or watched a movie, it would have been as if nothing had changed. Except that despite her room and family being the same, everything had changed.

When Morgan arrived home, there was a sort of emptiness hanging around the air. A sort of wrongness everywhere. As if there was something out of place, but you couldn't quite properly place what it was. As if everything in the room had been shifted a fraction of a millimetre to the right. A small change, barely visible. But enough of a change to make your head swim.

Morgan swallowed carefully at that thought, shifting her bag to one arm and letting it slide to the ground. The weight dropped, falling into the ground harshly, the noise echoing off of the empty walls. She squeezed her way past a chair to get through the kitchen to the room behind it.

The living room was small, and directly behind the kitchen. The light would pour in from the windows to the right of the desk. On the desk was her laptop, nothing special, silver glistening in the light.

That made Morgan pause.

She stepped closer, inspecting the laptop, running her fingers across the glistening and distinctly new edges of her laptop. Her father had gotten it back in 2014 when Morgan had been only 3 years old. The last time she had seen it, it had been dull, and rough, nothing like the shiny new computer that stood before her. And that was a problem.

Her computer was supposed to be old .

But it was now standing there in all of its menacing glory as if daring Morgan to continue to live in her blissful ignorance. It was glistening as if taunting her, glaringly bright in the otherwise normal room.

Like a constant reminder, egging on that small little voice in the back of her mind. This isn't normal. Clara Oswald is your English teacher. Danny Pink is friends with your dad. It was as if it was trying its hardest to force her out of her little cocoon.

Morgan had promised herself sheèd consider the frightening possibility that this was real, at home. Here, where she could have a mental breakdown in peace.

Morgan really didn't want to have a mental breakdown right now. She would rather live in blissful ignorance.

But Morgan also needed to face the truth.

And facing the truth was never going to be easy.

Yet, despite all of the glaring differences stabbing through her brain, so many things were the same.

She could almost pretend that everything was normal.

Almost.

Her password was the same, BacktotheFuture2020. Definitely not the most creative of passwords but did the job well. Or rather, if anyone had managed to break into her computer, she had never been made aware of it. Her father never did bother to look into any of her interests closely enough to be able to feasibly guess it.