Missed you at 6:30

CW: Themes of substance abuse, violence, and mental health struggles.

“Don’t you feel it…?”

Aimee began shaking her head before letting her finish the question.

“Not again, Mavie. We can’t go through the night with yet another one of your conjectures.”

Mavie didn’t bother continuing. This had happened too many times for her to be taken seriously anymore.

Dizziness, dissociation, the sensation that time was slowing down, as if her body were moving at a different rhythm from the environment around her. For weeks, she had been the only one experiencing those symptoms.

There, at the university party they were attending, those sensations—already familiar to her—returned. As she picked up her drink, she stared at the plastic cup in perplexity: the colours seemed to spill outward, as if in 3D. She blinked several times, and the visual effect vanished.

“Did you choose a non-alcoholic drink, like I reminded you?” Aimee asked, already accustomed to this occurrence.

“Yes,” Mavie nodded. “But it’s not something that can be solved so easily,” she insisted.

Aimee replied by motioning for her to lower her voice, glancing discreetly around them.

“Okay, but please stop talking so loudly. You’ll get us kicked out of here.”

Mavie had spent weeks going from specialist to specialist. Vision tests, neurological tests, psychological evaluations, therapy… But there were no answers—only useless treatments for stress and recommendations to stay away from social media and alcohol for a while.

One of the doctors had recommended admitting her to a psychiatric unit after an episode in which she claimed to see the same exact time on every clock she looked at. For an entire day, six thirty was all she could see, and no matter how much she insisted, her family and the people around her contradicted her, saying it wasn’t true, that time was passing normally.

That episode had been deeply overwhelming, but her parents convinced the medical professionals that they could manage by caring for her at home and stabilising her until she improved.

She had also had problems at university. During one of the semester exams, the examiner’s face had lost all features; it was just flat skin, without eyes, nose, or mouth. That disturbing image became more real the more she blinked. The examiner approached her, asking if she was all right, but having that faceless visage so close to her, speaking without any visible mouth, terrified her so much that she screamed and fell from her seat.

The clock in that classroom still read six thirty.

Expressionless faces followed her all the way from the university wellbeing services back to her home. The tranquilizers and antipsychotics her parents gave her didn’t help, not even during the two weeks of rest.

After those episodes, she had learned to control her reactions. She attended all her therapy sessions and said what everyone wanted to hear. She didn’t share the idea that she could no longer perceive the world’s colours as before, that the shapes and silhouettes of the objects around her seemed to blur in her peripheral vision, or that time passed inexorably while for her it remained static.

Many of her friends had distanced themselves from her, but she couldn’t blame them. She couldn’t even remember their faces anymore.

Aimee’s was the only one she could still see—perhaps because they had been friends since childhood, or perhaps because she was the only one who had stayed by her side during her leave of absence.

Despite the differences in what she perceived, voices were the same; the sounds around her matched what she considered familiar. Everything she knew was the same as it had always been, at least in theory.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” she told Aimee.

Aimee frowned.

“Do you want me to come with you? Will you be okay?”

Mavie shook her head.

“Don’t worry, I’m fine. I just need to splash some water on my face.”

It had been her own idea to come to this party. She had wanted to prove that she wasn’t the freak everyone said she was behind her back. So far, the cover had held, but the veil of normalcy was tearing apart with every passing second.

Making her way through the crowd in that house, she responded with a small smile to the greetings people directed at her, even though she couldn’t recognize their empty faces.

She hadn’t reached the bathroom yet when the music blasting from the speakers changed drastically. The rhythm of the song and the symphony of its notes awakened a distant memory in her mind. The people around her came to a complete halt, like pillars of salt.

Walking among them, she saw a distinct figure surrounded by a black halo. Its features were inhuman; it clearly did not belong in that place.

Mavie ran toward it, dodging obstacles along the way. That person returned her gaze with a chilling smile.

When she stood face to face with her, everything came rushing back. With a sharp pain in her chest, Mavie said:

“I want to go home.”

That figure was nothing more than a version of herself from another reality, with a far more sinister and macabre vibe. They shared the same eyes, the same hair, the same clothes… and yet, two entirely different natures.

“You are home,” her double replied mockingly.

“It doesn’t feel like it,” Mavie answered, on the verge of tears.

“But I’m not done experiencing your world yet,” the other complained, with feigned annoyance.

Thinking back, the mistake had been taking part in that stupid session of reaching out to “parallel realities” with her co-workers during their visit to a medium’s house.

Mavie had ended up discovering that she had an alternative version of herself in a completely different reality. In her double’s world, her best friend Aimee hadn’t died in their final year of high school, and together they had managed to get into the same university they had always dreamed of attending.

Manipulated by the apparent innocence of her alternate self, Mavie had agreed to switch places with her so that each of them could experience the other’s reality, since in Mavie's current world, she was married and had a child. Guilt over Aimee’s fatal accident had driven her to move far from her hometown so she could raise her family without the weight of the past.

However, the more time passed after the exchange, the more the world she was now in began to fall apart: it felt less and less real.

“We were never meant to meet,” her evil twin said, “but I can’t help but thank you for having made contact. I like the life you’ve given me.”

“I haven’t given you any life!” Mavie shouted. “I thought you were giving me the chance to relive the right version—the version of my life where everything was perfect… But I don’t belong here. I want to go home.”

Her alternate self drew that ominous smile once more as she stepped closer.

“Do you want to know why this world is falling apart? Because you traded your life for a dream.”

She moved away, as if about to leave, but before doing so, she said:

“Do you want a piece of advice? Never play with or test the lines that intersect parallel worlds. Do you know how many versions of you want to take your reality?”

Before Mavie could reply, her double disappeared, and everyone around her regained their movement. The faces were still empty, and the clock was still fixed at six thirty. Suddenly, what she thought she had under control was collapsing once again.

Crouching on the floor, covering her head, she cried in the middle of her panic attack. And although she could hear Aimee’s voice approaching, calling her name with concern, she no longer wanted to look up—because she didn’t want the only face she remembered in that world to disappear as well.