3:33 AM

Alex woke with his heart hammering. The clock read 3:33 a.m., red digits burning in the dark. The apartment was quiet and peaceful, not even the heating pipes were making their usual crackling sound, but Alex could still feel a slight tension in the air.

Alex shifted in bed, and at that moment, he heard muffled voices. The noise was coming from the street just below his apartment window. Two people, as if desperate for attention, were intensely engaged in a heated argument. He had difficulty making out any words, but he could still make out a male and a female voice.

He didn't move for a moment, just stared at the ceiling and listened. The noise didn't last long, and then there was complete silence. This made Alex wonder if this was all a figment of his imagination, if it was just in his head.

Somehow, he was more than sure that this wasn’t the first time it had happened; it was familiar. Alex remembered that he kept a small tape recorder in his nightstand - a memory from a previous life, a life as a sound engineer, a life in which he had meaning. He reached for it, but he didn't remember turning it on recently, and the tape recorder was recording. He sat up in bed, astonished, rewound the recording, and played it again. There was a hissing sound for a few seconds and then voices - muffled, but a little clearer this time.

- Female voice: "You don't get to decide how this ends!!"

- Male voice: "Why do you think there's a choice here?"

Alex froze at the sound of the man's voice. It was deeper than he remembered, but he was almost certain it was his.

And the woman, her voice... Alex played the recording again, trying to hear the last few words— "Alex..." That voice, that name, five years earlier sealed in voicemail, engraved in dreams—was Gracie.

His heart began to beat faster again. He turned off the recorder and stood by the window. It was quiet outside now, a silence he seemed to be hearing for the first time, and he began to rewind the tape of his memories.

Alex spent the rest of the night at his desk, a recorder plugged into his laptop, the waveform stretching across the screen like a jagged cut. He told himself he was just checking the sound quality to confirm what he had already heard. As he adjusted the levels, the voices grew clearer, closer, and more intimate. Gracie didn't sound angry like he remembered her, but more tense, like someone swallowing words they couldn’t bring themselves to speak.

- "You never listen, Alex," she said.

- "I listen," Alex replied - and flinched, her voice perfectly matching his rhythm. "I always listen."

- "That's a lie!" she snapped.

Alex scrolled the timeline back and forth. The argument had the same duration as always, according to the files with almost identical recordings that were saved on the hard drive - forty-two seconds. Strangely, he didn’t remember doing them.

On the third night, the voices returned, without warning, and Alex woke up, reaching for the recorder, the movement purely mechanical, not driven by thought, as if his body knew what to do before his mind. The clock was frozen at 3:33 a.m., just like the previous nights.

The argument was the same, except that Gracie's voice sounded softer.

- "You promised. You promised you'd stop," she said.

- "Stop what?" Alex replied.

The next night, Alex tried to stay awake, made himself a midnight coffee, sat stiffly in his chair, his eyes closing on their own. He convinced himself that he wouldn’t let it happen again, glanced at the clock—3:34 a.m., the recorder burning in his hand. And the argument had played out again anyway.

He stopped going out, stopped answering emails, and stopped answering phone calls. Suddenly, his life was reduced to sounds and shadows. He began obsessively turning up the volume to isolate Gracie’s voice, tracking the rise and fall of her every breath. He was obsessed. The more he cleared the sound, the more it changed, the longer the argument lasted. New lines began to be heard that he had no memory of ever saying - very cruel lines that did not suit him.

- "I'm tired of pretending," his voice said.

- "If you keep doing this, you'll stay here forever!" Gracie replied quietly.

Alex slammed the laptop shut and banged his head on the edge of the desk.

On the fourth night, Alex knocked on the door of the apartment across the hall. His neighbour, Mr. Kells, an elderly man with pale eyes, greying hair and beard, slightly hunched over, opened the door.

- “You hear it too,” Kells shot before Alex could even open his mouth. "The argument, always at the same time. Some sounds don't die down, boy, they rot in their place," the old guy finished with a slight smile and closed the door.

Alex returned to his apartment trembling and shocked. That night, Gracie's voice sounded different, somehow scared.

- "If you're listening to this," she said, "you have to let it go."

That night, the argument had begun before Alex woke up.

He woke to the sound of his own voice, sharp and insistent, as if speaking from a distant past. The recorder on his nightstand was flashing red, indicating it was recording. The clock this time read 3:31 a.m. And then Gracie's voice came, clearer and closer than ever, unmuffled.

- "You can't go on like this," she said. "It's not meant to go on."

Alex jumped out of bed, his heart racing again, grabbed the recorder, and bolted out of the apartment barefoot in his pyjamas. He rushed down the stairs, and the voices followed him, growing louder as he went down. The street was deserted; there were no people, no movement. The argument could now be heard above his head, as if it were pouring from his apartment. Alex stepped back and began looking for his window, and there, in his apartment, a warm light burned like never before. And at the window - two silhouettes, a man and a woman, close to each other. Himself and Gracie.

Their posture was exactly as he remembered it: her arms folded, his spread in a conciliatory gesture he used when he knew he was losing an argument. Their lips were in perfect sync with the voices pouring out into the night. The argument was not heard outside his apartment or on the street outside, but inside. Alex shook his head, his body trembling inside as if in a moment of alarm, the truth filling his mind and opening his eyes. The recorder was not a captured memory - he had captured it himself. A moment, stretched out in small parts, forced to repeat itself every night because he kept listening, kept remembering. Because he didn't want to let it go, didn't want it to end.

The argument had reached its very end, an end he never remembered. Gracie leaned forward, her face filled with fear.

- "You have to let it go," she said. "You can't keep us here forever."

The light in the window flickered. Alex turned and ran. The apartment had changed. Alex noticed it the moment he stepped through the door. The air felt heavy and dirty somehow, as if you were entering a room that had been sealed for too long. A thick layer of dust covered the floor, the table, the shelves, and the desk; it was everywhere. The glass on the counter wasn't his, and the old chair by the window that he had thrown away years ago was still there, untouched. And on the table, under the dust, a faint red light was blinking; the recorder was still working. He reached for it as if it were something alive, the display flickering, the numbers moving across the screen as they shouldn't. Time was stuttering.

Alex timidly pressed the play button. This time, the voices didn’t argue, and Gracie’s voice was calm and quiet:

- “If you let it go, it ends. But you end too.”

And there was silence, not even the air vibrating, and Alex had been frozen there for quite a long time. The recorder, all the files on the hard drive, the past - they had all held the memory of Gracie. It was not reality, but a looped memory. A wound that was kept open by rewinding and replaying. He lived stuck in the last night they had spoken, stretching it out over the years. And despite his denial, it was as if Alex knew the truth, but, out of fear or something else, he didn't dare acknowledge it to himself.

“To let it go” was meant to lose everything- no voice, no last word, no evidence of his existence. His thumb hovered over the delete button, but Alex clenched his hand and slammed it to the floor. The sound was final, the flashing light died, and the silence that followed was real; it was pure.

Alex woke in the morning, pale and cold, light streaming in, no recording, no voices, only the birds chirping faintly outside. He stood up awkwardly, his joints stiff, his muscles atrophied. The wall calendar showed January 2036. The paper was yellowed, the year wrong. Alex caught sight of his reflection in the window—visibly older, his skin thin, his brother almost grey, his eyes sunken. Ten years had evaporated. Time had rushed forward the moment the loop ended, taking back what it had stopped. The apartment was old, and so was Alex. Gracie was still gone.

No answers or revelations, just silence. He left without packing anything, closing the door behind him without looking back.

The lights in the hallway flickered as he passed, a pipe hissing from somewhere. Outside, the sky was clear, not a single wandering cloud. The winter sun hung low, illuminating Alex’s face with cold rays.

And that night, at 3:33 a.m., he slept through the silence.