Breaking Free

Jim's mind wandered as far from the diner as possible until the clanking silverware and droning conversations were tinkling bells and moaning arctic winds. The steaming aroma of a passing omelet became the distant smell of a nearby log cabin fireplace. The squeaking of the serving staff's anti-slip rubber soles began to sound like chattering, carefree snowbirds. In his mind's eye he glanced down at his beautiful bride, her face covered by a veil as pure and white as the glistening snow. He could almost feel her warmth in his arms, her perfume wafting lazily up into his nose.

"Morning Jim." The kind, soft voice was a thousand miles away.

He moved to peel back the veil and behold the face of his lover. He wanted desperately to put a name to the face and know the angel who chose him, who cherished him. He desperately wanted it to be someone familiar, an old comfortable friend.

A gentle hand came to rest on his shoulder. "Jim? Are you ready to order?"

He let out a long sigh and willed his eyes open, jolting his mind back to the mundane prison of his daily routine, a never-ending loop of breakfast, work, lunch, work, dinner, sleep, repeat. He turned his eyes up to face the waitress. He glanced at her nametag. Amy. She served him almost every morning. Always at the same worn vinyl booth along the diner's front-facing picture windows. Always the same distant look on his scruffy, unshaven face.

She smiled at him with a little too much pity in her eyes. "Daydreaming again this morning?"

He huffed through his nostrils and shrugged, half smiling. It was the only smile that suited him. He had tried a full smile once. A kid cried. He never tried it again.

Amy almost reached for the notepad in her apron pocket, but all Jim saw was a subtle twitch in her forearm.

He was about to ask for his usual order when a gust of cold winter air filled his lungs. He gasped and leaned slightly to the side to peer at the front doors. A severely under-dressed woman was marching directly toward him. She wore a plain white t-shirt, a mid-sized backpack, and unseasonably short jean shorts. Her straight brown hair draped around her shoulders like a long, silky skirt, sparkling with unmelted snowflakes and bouncing gently with every bounding step.

Almost in slow motion she seemed to duck and weave with practiced fluidity through the tables and around a startled young server. He tripped and in the blink of an eye she had his tray firmly in her hands while he stumbled onto the floor face first.

Both Amy and Jim stared at her in awe, their jaws slack and their eyes quickly drying. Jim was sure she looked familiar, but before he could place her she slid into the booth sitting across from him, having set the rescued tray on an empty table nearby.

The woman looked up at the waitress with a furrowed brow then glanced down at the untouched menu on the table.

Jim blinked. He knew exactly who she was. Megan. He should have recognized her sooner. They had been best friends in high school, though Jim had been through more than a decade and one failed marriage since then.

"Megan?" he asked, choking on a pool of spit in the back of his throat.

She raised her eyebrows and cocked her head at him, then slid the backpack off and quickly unzipped it. She shoved a hand inside and scooped out a fluffy, lanky kitten, its legs and tail dangling along her forearm. It let out a soft mew, looking around with huge unblinking eyes. She lifted the cat and thrust it toward the waitress. "Here," she said. "Have a kitten. And Jim will have a stack of pancakes."

Jim opened his mouth to protest.

Megan's gaze was locked on Amy's stunned eyes, which were still processing the sudden kitten. Megan continued, "Yes, I know Jim usually gets a breakfast burrito, but this morning he's having pancakes."

Amy stooped and gently cradled the kitten in her arms, shooting Jim a confused look.

Jim shrugged and Megan quickly pulled her hand free of the successfully delivered kitten.

Amy continued to stare into the eyes of the fur-ball in her arms, her face a perfect blend of shock and adoration.

Megan folded her hands on the table, squaring her shoulders with Jim.

Jim stared at Amy and the surprise kitten. His lips extended to form a "w" though he wasn't quite sure if he was going to ask, "who," "what," or "where." "How" also crossed his mind, but his lips weren't ready for such an intense question.

"It was a 'save the kitten' kind of day," Megan said flatly. She looked up at the love-struck waitress. "Pancakes?" she insisted slowly.

Amy glanced down at her and blinked. "Oh, right." She looked to Jim for approval.

The kitten's purring swelled in Jim's ears. Jim shrugged.

"Sure," Amy muttered, shuffling away with a wide grin on her face.

Megan rolled her eyes and locked in with Jim again.

Jim took a quick breath and managed to say, "what..." before Megan cut him off.

"Some days I save the kitten, some days..." she shrugged. "At first I didn't know the kitten needed saving, then I started doing it every day. Eventually I wondered if saving the kitten mattered or not."

Jim frowned so hard it gave him a mild headache. It was like she knew exactly...

"Yes, I know exactly what you're going to say before you say it," she sighed. She leaned forward onto her elbows and got comfortable. "No, I can't read your mind, no it's not magic. Well, maybe. We don't know yet. Yes, we. We have had most of this conversation before. I don't know how many times, I lost count ages ago."

Jim's heart was racing. This was unreal. His mind wasn't just blown, there was a continuous supernova in his head melting his brain from the inside out. He was too stunned to keep up. He couldn't make heads or tails of what she was saying. He heard the words, he understood the sentences, but nothing she was saying made a lick of sense.

Megan took a deep breath and leaned back against the old vinyl booth cushion. She closed her eyes and let out a long, calming sigh.

Jim's mind stopped racing. He slumped in his seat and rubbed his forehead.

Megan opened her eyes and the glint of suppressed tears shimmered in the corners. She looked tired. Too tired for seven o'clock in the morning. "I've been reliving this specific day for a long time," she said. "And you're the only person who believes me."

He did believe her. He absolutely believed her. He knew he shouldn't believe her, that most sane people wouldn't believe her, but he did. He cracked a wry grin and nodded.

She fell forward onto the table and let her face fall into her hands. Her muffled sobs were broken by choppy, gasping attempts to speak. "Why? Why today? What am I doing wrong? I'm trapped, stuck."

He blew out harshly through his nostrils and nodded in agreement. She didn't notice.

She continued. "It's been so long. So long! I'm tired of it. I've been tired of it so long I... I..." Her sobs consumed her. Her shoulders jerked and shuddered.

Jim reached out and put a hand on her back. Her ribs shook and gasped beneath his fingers. Somehow he knew. It had truly been too much. She had tried everything to put an end to it. Everything.

"Nothing works," she said, sniffling. "I always wake up on the same day, back in my bed, at the exact same time."

Jim pulled a fistfull of napkins from the chipped, stained chrome dispenser next to the salt shaker.

Megan lifted her red, shining face just enough to see the offering. She grabbed the whole bunch of them and disappeared into the cave between her arms again.

Jim's heart was pounding. He was short of breath. He believed her, but it was an entirely unbelievable situation. Days do not repeat. We don't get do-overs. It's the most tragic, universal truth.

After a long moment he folded his hands on the table close to her head. The heat from her damp scalp warmed his knuckles. She was quiet and still.

"Is this normally how it goes?" he asked tentatively.

Her torso jerked suddenly and she snorted. She lifted her face slightly and peered up at him from the shadows. He could see that she was smiling, though her eyes were red and her cheeks shiny with tears. "No," she said. "This is the first time I've sobbed like this."

He pursed his lips, unsure of what to say. There was a certain amount of second-hand embarrassment that he wanted to acknowledge, but she didn't seem ashamed. Then he remembered that as far as she was concerned, he wouldn't remember any of this tomorrow anyway. She could do this all again tomorrow without the sobbing. But him? He'd go on living. Or would he? His mind groaned under the strain of being stretched and pulled in new, unimaginable ways. Would he go on with these memories if she had to do it all over again? Surely he wouldn't. So would this version of him cease to exist? He decided that the only way he'd remember anything from this moment would be if this was her final day, the last encounter they shared before she broke out of the loop.

Suddenly he desperately wanted it to be the next day. Tomorrow couldn't come soon enough. Of course, he was sure Megan shared the sentiment in ways he could hardly begin to grasp.

"So this part of our conversation is all new?" he offered.

She sat up with a closed-lip smirk on her face. "Don't let it get to your head," she said wryly.

"Tell me about it," Jim said, swiftly succumbing to his curiosity. "The time loop. What are your theories?"

She paused and looked down at her hands. "What, like how did it happen? Why? How do I make it stop? I wish I had those answers. I don't know. And trust me, I've had plenty of time to think about it." She laughed with the vigor of an insane asylum resident.

Jim shrugged. "How have you spent most of the time? What kinds of goals have you had?"

She shook her head and looked down again. "I've told you a couple times, but it's always embarrassing." A deep crimson seeped onto the surface of her cheeks and her eyes quickly darted from Jim's face down to her hands. "I was convinced for a while that Tom and I were meant to be together, so I was trying to seduce him."

Jim's heart wrenched and jolted as if struck by lightning. When it started back up, he could hear his heart beating like distant war drums. In high school Tom had been a bully and a snob. All the cheerleaders and popular girls had been all over him like flies on a turd.

She huffed through her nostrils and shook her head with her eyes locked on her lap. "It was silly of me, and of course nothing I did with him broke this stupid curse."

He almost asked for more details about what she had done with Tom, but he quickly decided he didn't want to know.

Megan groaned and rolled her eyes, falling back in the booth until she was staring up at the ceiling. "It was so stupid," she said. "He's just as shallow and useless now as he was ten years ago. I don't know why I was still so obsessed with him, but believe me, I'm over him now."

Jim's curiosity hadn't entirely subsided. "Why did you invest so much time into pursuing him?"

Her lips parted confidently, ready to answer, but she seemed to choke on the thought. She closed her mouth and frowned. Her face contorted uncomfortably for a moment, then she said, "I guess I'm not sure."

Without thinking much about it, Jim heard himself ask, "What do you want?" The gravity of the question settled on his mind like a slab of molasses, slow, thick, and heavy. He could see that it had the same effect on Megan.

She leaned her head to one side and stared into space, half out the picture window into the street, half at the empty space in the booth next to Jim, and half into some distant part of her mind that was just out of reach in another plane of existence. Occasionally she opened her mouth to speak, but her lips flapped shut before she could produce any words.

Jim watched her curiously. Sometimes her eyes would dart around wildly, other times she gazed into infinity. Sometimes she stared at him with rusty gears grinding behind her eyes, other times she avoided looking at him entirely, focusing instead on a particularly deep scratch in the resin topped table.

At one point she mouthed the question to herself. "What do I want?" Though he couldn't hear her, he knew it was a question, and he could tell that it was tormenting her. How he wished he could hear all of her thoughts, or at least stand in the midst of her mind to observe as her mental machine sputtered and coughed its way through the work of constructing an answer.

Megan stared at him a bit longer than usual, her soft lips parted and dry.

A plate of pancakes clanked gently onto the table. Jim looked up. It wasn't Amy. It was a young man he didn't recognize. He smiled sheepishly and retreated after glancing at Megan's intense lock on Jim.

Jim looked back at Megan. Her eyes jumped to the pancakes and back up to his face. She was a little pale. Sweat was beading on her forehead. Jim noticed that her hands were trembling, but as soon as he saw them she quickly tucked them behind the table in her lap.

"What's the matter?" Jim asked, careful to keep his voice calm and warm. "Are you alright?"

She had been staring through him. She blinked and her eyes converged on his face again. "What I want," she muttered slowly, her lips barely moving. "Want." This time she whispered it so far under her breath that it was hardly more than a gentle exhale. Her focus was far away again. Her eyes locked onto his firmly, with explosive intensity. "I didn't know what I wanted," she declared. Now her voice was firm and clear. There was excitement in her eyes. The color was back in her cheeks. She smiled at him. It was the most pure, priceless smile Jim had ever seen. "I thought I knew what I wanted, but I was wrong. And it took me all this time to realize it."

Jim pursed his lips. A hundred questions were popping up in his mind, exploding like dry corn kernels in a fire. He longed to ride her train of thought, to at the very least hold the train ticket in his hand so he could see the destination.

He jumped when she slapped the table and laughed. "I can't believe it," she cried. The giddiness in her voice was infectious. His muscles were jittery. Tears were trickling out of the outside corners of her eyes. She wiped them with a glowing grin on her face. "I know what I have to do," she gasped, slamming two open palms on the table and sliding out of the booth.

"Where are you going?" Jim asked quickly.

She was already turning to leave. "I have to go take care of something." She stopped suddenly and whirled around to face him. "Can I meet you here again tomorrow?"

The question gave Jim a violent start. He recoiled and furrowed his brow. "Tomorrow?" he asked.

She nodded wildly with a huge smile. "Tomorrow," she said with finality.

He blinked and shook his head to clear it. "Sure, of course. I come here every day around this time."

She beamed at him with her whole face, then turned to leave again.

"Your bag!" he shouted, seeing that it wasn't on her back.

In response she rushed back to the table, but not to grab her backpack. To his complete surprise she threw herself at him, pulled his face into hers with both hands, and locked lips with him in a way that he had only ever been able to dream of. It was a warm, genuine, powerful kiss full of passion, love, and a little lust. It was a kiss that shut off his biological clock and activated every pleasure center in his body. By the time she pulled away to gaze deeply into his eyes, he was only sure of one thing, that their lives would never be the same after that kiss.