Strings of Fate: The First Loop

PROLOGUE

---- JAMES ANDREW GRAY----

The ocean....
Strange...
It didn't feel cold...

It should have.

The early morning wind bit at his skin, but James didn't flinch. He stood there, toes curled in the sand, waves pulling at the cuffs of his jeans like a child tugging a mother's hand; needing, begging, desperate for attention. But he had no more to give. Not to the ocean. Not to the sky. Not even to himself.

He stared at the horizon, where the world blurred.

Water.

Sky.

Memory.

There was no clear beginning, no end. Just an endless loop that folded in and out of itself, like the dream he couldn't wake from. He breathed. In. Out. And with every inhale, he felt further from his own body, like he was living inside a story someone else had written. A life someone else had ruined.

His lips parted, and the words tumbled out, raw and half-broken:

"Have you ever felt like you lived through a lifetime but can't figure out what or how you lived it? Almost like a memory. Almost like déjà vu."

No one answered.

Only the waves replied, crashing over and over like the heartbeat of a ghost. He glanced down at his palms. They were shaking again. Not from cold.

From knowing. Knowing something was missing. Something important. Something unbearable.

When I wake up, everything is just a fading thought. A dried tear on my cheek. A feeling... that I must make it right this time.

But what? What did he have to fix?

He pressed his knuckles into his eyes and tried to summon her face. He didn't know her name. Not really. But the image was there, hovering just beyond reach. A girl with a sunbeam laugh and pain behind her eyes. A girl who had once looked at him like he was worth something.

Betty.

The name crashed into his chest like a wave crashing loud into the shore, almost like a whisper, almost a scream. Was that her? Was that real? Or just another trick of a half-dreamt life? He saw fragments. Hazy memories painted in bruised pastels, surging like currents, flashing, and flickering like a bad movie montage of a nightmare. A hand reaching for his. A shared coat in the rain. A scream. A slammed door. A kiss. A broken silverware. A sound of a golden ring aginst the marble floor. The beep of a hospital machine. Chaos. Silence.

And then, always, the ending.

Her walking away. Or dying. Or disappearing.

Each version different.

Each one his fault.

Sometimes, I wonder if this is my punishment, remembering a story only I seem to know. A story where I was the villain and the boy in love. The friend. The liar. The dreamer. The destroyer.

He swallowed hard.

It was cruel. This half-memory. This life lived out of sequence. There were days he woke up in a panic, sure he'd lost something. Someone. But the details evaporated like mist. Everytime he wakes up, he is chasing a memory, a dream, a distant life he can't quite figure out, close but always out of reach. There were other days, more often now, when he didn't feel human at all. Just a shell. A vessel for regret.

He couldn't tell what was dream and what was memory. If he had actually lived these moments or just imagined them into existence out of longing.

There was one dream that came more than the rest. A girl, dancing barefoot on a basketball court. Sparks Fly. Music playing faintly in the background. His heart pounding in his chest. She twirled and laughed, and he said something he could never quite remember when he woke up. Something that made her smile.