So It Goes.

Elijah Marris was born on a Wednesday and died on a Thursday, but he lived most of his life somewhere in between.

He was not particularly brave. Not particularly cruel. But history has a way of dragging the unremarkable into remarkable places. And so, at nineteen, Elijah found himself in the middle of a desert war, holding a rifle that weighed more than his conscience.

The blast that changed everything came just before sunset. A roadside bomb, clever and cowardly, tore through the convoy like paper. Elijah remembered flying, the sky smeared red and gold, and then—

Nothing.

And then—

Everything.

He woke up in a hospital bed, blinking under fluorescent lights that hummed like insects. But when he closed his eyes, he was back in his childhood home, watching cartoons on a scratchy couch. He blinked again, and he was in a trench. Blink—his wedding day. Blink—his funeral.

He had become unstuck in time.

At first, he thought it was a dream. Then, a curse. Eventually, he accepted it as fact. He never knew what day he’d land on next. There was no control. No pattern. His life became a shuffle of scenes—triumph, boredom, pain, love—all skipping like a scratched record.

One moment, he was five years old, asking his mother why the moon followed them home. The next, he was forty, watching his son graduate. And then he was back in the sand, screaming as the world exploded again.

“So it goes,” he muttered the first time he realized he’d seen his death. He didn’t know why he said it. It just came out, like a reflex. And he said it again. And again.

“So it goes” when his best friend was shot beside him.

“So it goes” when his daughter was born.

“So it goes” when he stood on a rooftop, staring down at a city that never noticed him.

His wife, Lena, always looked at him like she suspected he was never fully there. He would sometimes talk about events before they happened, or cry over things she hadn’t said yet. He once told her he loved the way her hair looked when she turned fifty, even though they were only twenty-seven. She laughed, and he laughed, but she never brought it up again.

He didn’t age normally. He felt every year, but his body obeyed the rules of the scene. Some days he was old, aching and soft. Other days he was a teenager again, confused and angry at a world that hadn’t made sense even the first time.

He began to see the shape of his life as a mosaic instead of a line. Patterns emerged. Choices echoed. He realized he had walked past the same homeless man three separate times in different decades, and never once stopped. He cried over that for two years.

“So it goes.”

But there was beauty, too. Kisses in the rain. His son’s first word. The warmth of Lena’s hand in the dark when she thought he was asleep. These things repeated, like favorite songs in the universe’s playlist.

He once asked a dying comrade, “Do you think we go somewhere?”

The man blinked slowly. “We already are everywhere, man.”

It comforted him.

Eventually, he returned to the blast one final time. He knew it was the end, not because of pain, but because he didn’t blink away this time. He simply lay there, blood pooling beneath him, staring at a cracked piece of sky.

He smiled.

In the distance, he heard laughter—his own, at age ten. He smelled pancakes, saw Lena’s eyes, and felt the ache of old wounds. Every moment he had ever lived came rushing into him like breath. He wasn’t afraid.

“So it goes,” he whispered, and let the moment be.