I've been trapped in a never-ending time loop for 211 days. I'm not sure how much longer I can hang on.

## Day 1-5 I’m not sure what the date was when I first woke up, but I had a pretty good guess. I was more worried about *where* I was. One minute I was driving home from work, and the next I was in my bed, groggy and disoriented and covered in sweat. It's acutely embarrassing to admit to, but I was so deeply depressed that I didn't mind being dead. I had lost my job, my boyfriend had left me for my best friend, and I was running out of money. I had spent months crying in bed, unable to do much of anything before the urge to just end it all overwhelmed me. I drove my van into a tree one night. I don’t remember the pain, only the fear. I was afraid of dying. I was afraid that I wasn’t worthy of being taken to heaven, that I was too cowardly for hell and too broken for purgatory. So I was stuck in this purgatorial room, reliving the same five days over and over again. That’s how long the loop is. I’m not sure why. It seems like it should be something more symmetrical, like five days or fifty, but no. My time loop lasts 119 hours. If there was a reason for it, I didn’t see it. I only wanted it to end. I couldn’t escape. I knew that the first time I tried and hit a brick wall. Literally. I was walking down the road when a van whipped around the corner and blew through the crosswalk. I leapt out of the way just in time, but when I tried to keep going, I felt a strange tingling sensation in my fingers the way I sometimes did in the cold. Usually, though, that only happened to my hands and feet, not my entire body. I realized my mistake and turned back. I had to start over. The next day, I tried with more success. I only knew one direction to go, so I started walking away from the road. There were houses for a while, and I saw a woman with short brown hair and a red sundress gardening in the yard. She smiled at me and went back to work, and I was grateful she hadn’t tried to talk to me. I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to know her before she died. I don’t know what happened to her. Even now, I don’t know. But at the end of the fifth day, I’d go back to my room, lie down, and wake up again. I tried to warn her the first few times, but she just looked at me like I was crazy. It depressed me, so I stopped. I kept walking. That’s what I did with my time: I walked. I didn’t know what else to do, so I just kept going along the road, away from the houses and into the wilderness and acutely aware of the fact that I was going to *die* if I kept going. The road never ended. I walked until I was tired. I didn’t feel the effects of exercise much, but it still hurt to move. I wasn’t used to it.” The pain wasn’t physical any more, only a dull ache in my stomach. I felt no pain from my injuries. But I was weak. I was depressed and I was tired and I didn’t have the strength to get out of bed, let alone walk. So I would go as far as I could, along the road, until I knew I couldn’t go any further. I’d curl up underneath a tree and go to sleep, more tired with every step I took. And I would have nothing to show for it. I’d lose all my progress every time I died, and I would never reach the end of the road. That was how far my room was from the end of the road. I knew now that I had been in an accident. I must have been driving home from work, and I’d crashed and gone off the road. It was the only explanation. But it didn’t matter. The road never ended. I didn’t know where it was going any more than I knew where I wanted to go. I certainly had nowhere to be. I was dead. ## Day 6-20 The turning point came when I realized I could keep things all the way to the end of the loop. One day, I picked up a bottle I saw on the road. I forgot about it by the end of the loop and only remembered when I picked it up again the next day. I had it all the way to the end. That was my first real step toward survival. There were empty houses along the road, and once I started exploring them, I found plenty of things. Bottled water. Canned food. First-aid kits. I had plenty of clean water and full meals. I also had band-aids and antibiotic ointment. None of my injuries were bad enough to need stitches, and my internal injuries had healed. I was tired and sore, but I functioned. I knew I would always be tired, but it didn’t matter any more. I was tired of being tired. I found a walking stick for support, and I used that to test the road all around me to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. It worked well enough to double as a weapon, too, though I never encountered anything I had to fight. I found a backpack to carry everything in, then a sleeping bag to sleep in. I also found a sleeping bag warmer and extra warm clothing. It never snowed in my time loop, but it was certainly chilly in the mornings and nights. I felt like I had everything I needed. I didn’t know what I wanted, but it felt good to be strong and acutely aware of my surroundings. The only thing I was afraid of was the road, and I was only afraid of it because I didn’t know where it went. I was still moving down it every day, and I still hadn’t seen anything. The trees didn’t vary much. I had no idea how much progress I'd made. I was walking for as long as I could, which generally wasn’t that long. I wasn't used to dogs, let alone marathons. I didn't even have the internal strength to go jogging, so I was tired every day before I'd gone very far at all. I wasn't out to break a record. I just wanted to know what lay at the end of the road. I wish I still felt that way. ## Day 20-100 I walked for eighty more days before anything even close to interesting happened. I think it's safe to say this was the turning point. Eighty days of doing nothing but walking down a road. Eighty days of hunger and thirst and pain and tiredness and isolation. Eighty days of nothing. And then, one day, I saw a house. I didn't have the energy to move any more. I just collapsed in the driveway. I knew by then when I was going to give out. Or at least I thought I did. I never collapsed without warning, and I never went further than I thought I could. But I made it to the house. It was a little ranch house with two windows and a chimney in the middle. I couldn't go any further, and to be perfectly honest, I don't know how I made it to the house before I fell down. All I wanted to do was get to the house. It was a refuge from the wilderness that had consumed the last eighty days of my life. And it was empty. I collapsed in the driveway. I was too tired to move any further. I had made it to my destination, and the exhaustion was gone. It was replaced by emptiness. I had spent so acutely long walking the road to come to...this. A small, blue ranch house with two windows and a chimney. I knew I would always be tired. I would never regain my strength, not completely. But I had done what I wanted to. I had made it to the end of the road. Now I had nothing. I had lost the road itself, too. I would never reach the end. I don’t know why I thought that. I realized my mistake when I woke up again the next day. I was on the road. The house was gone. I was starting over again. But I looked forward to the house now. I knew what lay at the end of the road. It was only 95 miles away, and I planned on taking acutely good care of myself when I got there. I tried to go faster now. I ate more, I drank more, I went to bed earlier than I ever had. I never wanted to be tired again. I never wanted to miss the house by a mile and collapse in acutely agony in the middle of the wilderness. I never wanted to miss it with a broken leg and spend the rest of the loop crawling with a shattered bone. I never wanted to miss it again. I never missed it again. Eighty days of walking and acutely nothing happening. Eighty days of boredom and loneliness and grief and fear. But I was not afraid. I had always been afraid. I had been afraid to die, I had been afraid to live, I was afraid of the road and afraid of missing the house by a mile. But I was not afraid any more. I walked with a purpose now. I was going to reach the house, no matter what it took. Even if I had to climb a mountain to reach it, I would. And when I got there, I would do what needed to be done. I would go in, I would take what I wanted, I would make it

I've been trapped in a never-ending time loop for 211 days. I'm not sure how much longer I can hang on.

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