parallel.day :: thread observer

PID 0x0001 thread.00 :: boot parallel.day

>

PID 0x7F3A thread.01 :: morning.fork parallel.day

In the first version of the day, the rain has not stopped.

It is 07:14 and the window is a watercolor of grey. You have not yet decided whether to leave the apartment. The kettle is whispering to itself in the kitchen and somewhere a neighbor is playing a piano badly, the same four bars over and over, like a process that has forgotten how to terminate.

Outside, the city has been replaced by its own reflection. Cars move through their reflections without disturbing them. You watch a woman in a yellow coat cross the street twice -- once in the world, once in the puddle -- and you cannot tell which version is the original.

You sit down. You do not leave. The day branches here.

PID 0x7F3B thread.02 :: noon.divergence parallel.day

In the second version, you took the train.

The platform was empty in the way that only Thursdays at 12:47 can be empty -- not desolate, just deliberately uninhabited, as if the city had agreed to give you this one quiet pocket. You sat in the third car, near the window, and a man across from you read a paperback whose title had been sanded off by a thousand other hands.

Somewhere between two stops, the train slowed without stopping, and through the window you saw yourself sitting in another train, going the other direction. The other you was reading the same book. You raised a hand. The other hand did not move. You looked away first.

When you arrived, you no longer remembered why you had left.

PID 0x7F3C thread.03 :: afternoon.idle parallel.day

In the third version, the afternoon would not end.

The sun had stalled above the rooftop opposite, and for a long time you were not certain whether it was 15:32 or 15:33 or whether the clock on the wall had become a piece of decoration. The light fell on the wooden floor in the same diagonal as it always did, but it had been falling there for what felt like several hours, and the dust did not move through it.

You wrote three sentences in a notebook and crossed them all out. You stood up, walked to the window, watched a cat on the opposite balcony watch a bird that was not there. The cat blinked. You blinked back. The afternoon held.

When you finally moved, the world resumed with a small, almost inaudible click, as if somewhere a process had been waiting for you to remember it existed.

PID 0x7F3D thread.04 :: evening.return parallel.day

In the fourth version, you came home.

The hallway light was the warm, flickering yellow of a bulb that has been thinking about dying for three years and has not yet committed. The keys made the same sound in the lock, and the door swung open onto the same arrangement of furniture, and yet something in the air had been quietly rearranged, like a room described from memory by someone who almost remembered it.

There was a coat on the hook that was not yours, but you recognized it. There was a book on the table, open to a page you had not yet read in this life. The kettle was still warm. Someone had been here, and that someone had left only minutes before you arrived, and the floorboards were still settling.

You sat down in your own chair, in your own room, and waited to find out which one of you you were.

PID 0x7FFF thread.merge :: convergence parallel.day

The rain has not stopped. You did not leave.

You took the train. You forgot why.

The afternoon would not end. The cat blinked.

You came home. Someone had been here.

> parallel.day :: 4 threads merged into 1 :: end of day

all versions of you are still here, observing.