There were conversations at the café that seemed to loop. Carter sat down at his usual spot, the corner table next to the window, where the light never quite reached comfortably. Today, he overheard a talk on time reversal, and it felt oddly out of place—like a word from an old newspaper buried beneath contemporary clatter.
"It's not magic," the speaker argued, a middle-aged man with spectacles sitting too high on his nose. "It’s a matter of perception. You simply reverse how you look at the sequence. Ever considered your breakfast running back into the bowl?"
Carter chuckled to himself, stirring the last remnants of cold coffee with a forgotten spoon. He imagined the toast, jumped back to the table, and the butter painting itself back onto the slice.
Conversations wedged into their own rhythms, stuck like loops in an old record. Unspool was the word that came to mind, a desire to scratch the surface and see what lay beneath the, perhaps, confounding wisdom.
Later, while heading home along cobblestone streets, he thought about how people often rewind their narratives in solitude—like tapes forgotten in the closet. Memories could be packed into boxes, emptied out, and flipped to show another story.
"I have a theory, too," Carter murmured to nobody in particular, a habitual response to his perceptual altercations. "Humans are clocks running backward, in search of un-speaking the time."
"It's an arduous reversal, but do you doubt the possibility?"
As he reached home, the door creaked—a sound symbolic, appropriate, reverberating within the empty rooms. He considered locking away a portion of his own discourse, mirroring the man at the café.
He whispered goodnight to the nostalgic idea that perhaps today was yesterday done differently. Wasn't familiarity a strange cousin to the new?
Navigate your reflection, discover another dimension.