DON'T BLINK

I don’t know when it started. Maybe it was the rain from that afternoon. Heavy, rhythmic, drumming a cold insistence against the office windows. Maybe it was that blink I didn’t notice until afterward, when the world had quietly shifted a fraction of a second ahead of me.

The clock read 3:14 p.m. I blinked. The usual, involuntary shutter. And when my eyes opened, something had changed. The printer hummed longer before falling silent. The pen I’d left at the desk’s edge was now beside the monitor. My coffee cup, brown and warm, released a new curl of steam.

I laughed. “It’s nothing,” I whispered to myself. But the sound felt hollow. My coworkers moved through the office unaware of what just happened. Their chatter was steady, unbroken. Everything was as it should be. Yet I felt lighter. Untethered.

That night, I dreamed of another apartment. It was my apartment, but not mine. The walls were the same pale grey, the couch the same frayed fabric. But the light was softer, the air cleaner. In that dream, I moved through rooms, smiling faintly at a life I hadn’t lived. When I reached for coffee, the steam curled toward me like recognition. I was watching another version of myself, someone who had chosen better, survived better.

When I woke, my sheets were tangled, my pulse racing. I whispered my own name, hoping to anchor myself. The echo came back a heartbeat later, as if someone else had said it too.

The next day, small distortions crept in. The printer aligned perfectly. The traffic lights changed at my approach. My coffee was always the right temperature. Files opened without error. The world moved with a precision that excluded me.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the same city, I could feel that another me was unraveling. I saw him in flickers: reflections lagging, smiles delayed. My toothbrush shifted places. My mug half-full when I remembered it to be empty. A whisper not my own.

I began keeping notes. Dates, times, anomalies:

• 3:14 p.m. blink.

• Coffee hot. Pen moved. Printer hums longer.

• Reflection smiles late.

I didn’t know if I was recording reality or creating it.

By the third day, the boundary leaked. Voicemails appeared on my phone — my own voice, cheerful:

“Hey. It’s me. Just wanted to say I’m proud of you.”

I replayed it, waiting for logic to explain it. None came.

The reflection began to betray me. It hesitated, lagged, its eyes weighted with strange intent. When I touched the glass, it followed, but it was a beat too slow. As if it had to remember my movements before mimicking them.

Every night I dreamed of that other apartment, that other life. The other me would look up from his coffee and smile with quiet understanding. His smile said: I am you. But you are not me.

The world itself had begun to stagger. Conversations skipped mid-sentence. Objects shifted subtly when I looked away. I felt like I was being watched. Not by someone else, but by another version of myself waiting behind the glass.

Then the whispers began. Not words, but tremors in the hum of the refrigerator, in the air conditioning, in my own breath. My voice, faintly distorted, murmuring: Don’t blink.

I stopped sleeping.

By the end of the week, I knew. There was another me, taking my life one fragment at a time. Not violently, but inevitably, like a tide claiming the shore. My existence became the echo. His, the original.

I started a journal, clinging to chronology. But new entries appeared in handwriting slightly steadier than mine, more certain of the world’s shape.

One morning, a voicemail arrived. My voice again, whispering: “Don’t blink.”

It became a pattern: every day at 3:14, the fracture widened. A cosmic misfire, a quantum fault line splitting me into two. One version thrived; the other decayed. I wasn’t sure which I was anymore.

That night, I stood before the mirror as rain slowed outside, suspended in the glow of the streetlight. “Who are you?” I asked.

The reflection smiled, a heartbeat too late.

“You shouldn’t have blinked.”

Time itself held its breath. I understood, dimly, that the world I’d known hadn’t been stolen. It had simply receded, leaving me stranded between realities.

The days blurred. Clocks stuttered. Reflections mocked me with flawless timing. At work, files I hadn’t touched were completed and signed. Trains waited for me. Emails I never wrote appeared as sent, polished and precise.

At night, my apartment thrummed with the pulse of another presence. Shadows clung to corners. The mirror breathed with me, its rhythm out of sync. I wrote frantic notes, but they reappeared rewritten in another hand.

3:14 p.m. blink.

Reflection delayed. Coffee hotter. Pen moved.

Someone else lives this life better than I do.

The whispering deepened, threading through every sound in the room. The static on my old speakers. The hum of the fridge. The rotation of the ceiling fan. Always I heard: Don’t blink.

Dreams blurred into waking. I walked through that perfect apartment again. The warm light, the clean air. Until I felt myself awake there. For a moment, I believed it was real. Until I saw the other me moving calmly through my motions, smiling at the mirror with serene assurance.

He left traces. A steaming mug I hadn’t filled. A book I hadn’t bought. Notes written in my own hand, left for me to find.

It was then that I realized he wasn’t living beside me. He was living through me. Each day, he occupied more of the space, claiming the seconds before I reached them.

I tried to resist. I refused to blink at 3:14. I avoided mirrors, documented everything, slept in fits. But reality itself faltered. Conversations looped. Faces blurred. My own reflection began moving first, reaching, smiling, anticipating.

Then it spoke. Silent lips in the mirror: You shouldn’t have blinked.

It wasn’t threat or comfort. It was inevitability.

The fracture had become permanent. Only one of us could remain. And I couldn’t tell which version deserved to.

The city began to shimmer. Streetlights bending ahead of their glow, rain reversing mid-drop. Time froze and unspooled in uneven pulses. Every reflection became a doorway.

Still, I hoped. Maybe if I could align with the blink, I could reset it, reclaim reality, or at least glimpse it one last time.

It happened at 3:14 a.m.

I woke in the glow of streetlights, suspended between dreams. My body felt both heavy and hollow. I knew, without knowing how, that the other me was near.

I stood before the mirror. The reflection waited, wrong as ever. Then the surface rippled. Not like water, but like a pulse of light through glass. The other me stepped forward without crossing. His eyes were calm, certain.

“Why?” I whispered.

He smiled, my smile, perfected. “Because you blinked. Someone had to hold the moment.”

The air thickened. Rain froze midair. The city folded on itself, streets colliding like reflections in shattered glass. My apartment stretched, breathed.

I pressed my palms to the mirror. “Stop!” I begged.

He tilted his head, almost pitying. “It’s time. Only one of us can remain.”

I realized then, survival wasn’t a choice. It was chance. The blink itself decided who the world would keep.

My surroundings felt warped. The coffee cup I hadn’t filled steamed beside the book I hadn’t bought. My pen lay perfectly aligned. He had already lived this moment. I was the echo.

Still, I reached for the glass. My fingertips met the cold surface. I blinked.

Everything shattered.

Light fractured into infinite reflections. Versions of me, overlapping, collapsing. Rain fell upward. The apartment folded in on itself, dissolving into static. I felt myself thinning, fading. Not dying, but receding, like a shadow dissolving into dusk.

And then, silence.

When I woke, the city was still. The apartment was perfect. The coffee brewed to taste. The book lay open where I’d left it. My reflection moved exactly with me. No lag.

Relief should have come. Instead, I felt the world breathing around me, aware.

I leaned closer to the mirror. My reflection gazed back. But lingered half a second too long, lips curling into a faint smile that wasn’t mine.

Then a voice, soft and close, whispered from somewhere deep inside me: You shouldn’t have blinked.

I don’t know which version I am. The one who lived confidently, or the one who fractured. I remember both. I feel both.

Now I keep my eyes open. Always. I watch the smallest things: a shadow that hesitates, a raindrop that stops midair. The world is fragile. Held together by the thin film of perception.

And every blink is an invitation.

I cannot close my eyes. Not ever.

Because somewhere, someone else is waiting for the split second.

And I’m not sure I’ll survive it.