Vujà dé

A lot of folks talk about déjà vu like it’s a glitch in the cosmic record—some little loop in the universe’s vinyl. I’ve never had that. Not once. My life runs the opposite direction.

I get vujà dé—the bone‑deep certainty that none of this has ever happened before, that the world is improvising around me, that the script supervisor quit sometime around dawn and the universe has been winging it ever since.

And every time it hits, I think the same thing: None of this shit’s happened before!

That’s the line I tell people when they ask why I look startled in grocery stores or why I pause before opening familiar doors. They laugh, assuming I’m joking. I let them. It’s easier than explaining the truth: the world keeps changing on me, and I’m the only one who notices.

The First Shift: It started on a Tuesday, which feels like the kind of day reality would choose to malfunction. I woke up in my apartment, same as always, except the window faced the wrong street. Not a little wrong—completely wrong.

Instead of the brick building with the faded mural of a fox, I saw a parking lot I’d never seen before. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, checked the clock, checked the window again. Same parking lot. Same unfamiliar cars. Same creeping certainty that the world had rearranged itself overnight.

I walked outside expecting someone to say, “Surprise! We moved your building!” But the neighbors waved like nothing was strange. The mail carrier handed me a stack of envelopes addressed to me at an address I didn’t recognize. And when I asked him if the street had always been this way, he gave me a look people reserve for folks who ask whether birds are government drones.

That was the first time I said it out loud: “That didn’t happen.”

The words felt like a protest, a line drawn in the sand. But the sand didn’t care.

The Second Shift: A week later, the grocery store changed. Not remodeled—changed. The aisles were in different places, the freezers were on the opposite wall, and the bakery had vanished entirely. I stood there holding a basket of oranges, trying to figure out where the bread had gone, when a woman bumped into me and said, “You okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I think the store’s different,” I said.

“It’s been like this for years.”

“No,” I said, “it hasn’t.”

She shrugged and walked away, leaving me in a place that felt like a dream someone else was having.

That night I wrote everything down—street names, store layouts, the color of my front door—just to prove to myself that I wasn’t losing it. But the next morning, the notebook was full of handwriting that wasn’t mine. Same pen, same ink, but the letters leaned differently, like someone else had tried to mimic my style and gotten bored halfway through.

I stared at the pages and whispered, “That didn’t happen.”

But it had. Or it hadn’t. Or it had in a version of the world that no longer existed.

The Third Shift: The worst because it involved people.

I was at a diner I’d been going to since college. Same cracked vinyl booths, same smell of burnt coffee and fried onions. The waitress, Marla, had been there forever—she once told me she’d worked the counter long enough to watch three generations of the same family order the same breakfast.

But that morning, she didn’t recognize me.

“Coffee?” she asked, pen poised.

“Black,” I said. “And the usual.”

She blinked. “The what?”

“You know,” I said, smiling. “The usual. Eggs over medium, hash browns, rye toast.”

She shook her head. “Never seen you before.”

I laughed, waiting for the punchline, but her face stayed blank. When she walked away, I looked around the diner. The booths were the same shape, but the colors were wrong. The jukebox was gone. The menu had different items. And the man who always sat in the corner reading the newspaper—gone.

I left without eating.

Outside, the air felt too thin, like the world had been stretched.

The Fourth Shift: I’d stopped pretending things were normal. I’d started taking photos of everything—my apartment, my street, my face in the mirror—just to have proof. But the photos changed too. Not dramatically, just enough to make me doubt myself. A lamppost missing here, a building taller there, my hair slightly shorter or longer depending on the day.

One morning, I woke up to find a scar on my forearm. A long, pale line I’d never seen before. I touched it, half expecting it to vanish like a mirage, but it stayed. Solid. Real. Except it wasn’t real. Not to me.

“That didn’t happen,” I whispered.

But the scar didn’t care.

The Fifth Shift: It wasn’t a place or a person. It was time.

I was walking downtown when I saw a billboard advertising a movie I’d never heard of. The release date was last year. People were talking about it like it had been a cultural phenomenon. Memes, references, quotes—everyone knew it. Everyone except me.

I went home and searched for it. There were interviews, reviews, behind‑the‑scenes footage. All of it looked real. All of it looked like it had been around forever.

But I had no memory of it.

That’s when I realized the truth: the world wasn’t changing around me. I was slipping between versions of it. Sliding sideways through realities like a coin rolling across a table, wobbling from one face to the other.

And every time I landed, the universe pretended nothing was wrong.

The Sixth Shift: It happened tonight.

I was sitting on my couch, trying to decide whether to accept this new reality or fight it, when the lights flickered. Not a normal flicker—more like the room blinked. One moment everything was solid, the next it was a watercolor painting someone had spilled water on. The walls ran. The furniture blurred. The air hummed like a tuning fork.

Then it snapped back.

Except it wasn’t my apartment anymore.

The walls were painted a color I hated. The furniture was unfamiliar. The photos on the shelves showed people I didn’t know—me standing beside strangers, smiling like we’d shared years together.

I walked from room to room, touching everything, hoping something would feel familiar. Nothing did.

I sat on the edge of the bed and said it again, louder this time: “That didn’t happen.”

But the universe didn’t answer.

The Next Shift: I don’t know when it will come. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe in an hour. Maybe while I’m writing this sentence. But I’ve stopped trying to hold onto any version of the world. It’s like gripping water—no matter how tight your fist, it slips through.

What I do know is this: déjà vu is a comfort. It means you’ve been somewhere before. It means the world has patterns, rhythms, echoes.

Vujà dé is the exact opposite. It’s the sense that the world is improvising, that reality is making itself up as it goes, that you’re walking through a story no one has written yet.

And maybe that’s terrifying.

Or maybe it’s freedom.

Because if none of this shit has happened before, then anything can happen next.