WHERE TIME FOLDS AND THE SELF UNRAVELS
The Room Of All Tomorrows
A surreal journey through the fragments of a man’s life, as every version of himself collides in the impossible space of memory and regret
He didn’t know how he got there, but something about the room was impossible. The walls pulsed, not like they were alive, but like they were breathing. The ceiling stretched out too far, and yet, somehow, it closed in around him. A feeling hung in the air — dense, ancient, unnameable, like the scent of something long buried. He was thirty-six, his body both known and foreign, as though his bones were no longer made of matter but some otherworldly substance. His skin, stretched across him, fit, but only barely. And before him — all his selves — from the first gasp of infancy to the inevitable silence of death, were gathered, impossibly compressed into a space that expanded endlessly.
Each version of him flickered, not quite still, as though time had lost its grip. The baby gurgled in the corner, fat fingers gripping at the air. His eighty-year-old self, sunken into the far side of the room, stared, eyes hollow but glistening with something beyond knowing.
“Why are we here?” thirty-six asked, the words falling sideways, collapsing into the room’s impossible geometry.
“You already know,” rasped his eighty-year-old self, though his mouth never moved. The voice didn’t come from his throat but from the walls themselves — thick with time, rippling as though reality had frayed at the edges.
The baby giggled. The fifteen-year-old shifted, uncomfortable in his acne-ridden skin. The twenty-eight-year-old crossed his arms, a smirk glued to his face. But none of them moved. They were statues, but they breathed.
Thirty-six moved, though the sensation was more like sliding through water, each step distorting, pulling him deeper into the room’s bending reality. He stopped before ten, the boy with scraped knees and a grin smeared with chocolate, who stared up at him with reckless hope.
“I know how to dream,” ten whispered, though his lips never parted. His voice was both behind and in front of thirty-six, inside him and nowhere at once. “I thought you’d become something… something big. Did you?”
Thirty-six hesitated. The walls pulsed again, a long sigh from a dimension he couldn’t see. “I’m not sure anymore,” he said. As he spoke, the air grew heavy, pressing down, suffocating. The weight of possibility — it had been boundless back then. But now it felt like a cosmic joke, something cruel that only ten could laugh at.
He turned away before the child could speak again. The silence that followed gnawed at him, growing like a shadow that didn’t belong to his body.
At fifteen, chaos festered. Acne, hormones, and anger, all boiling beneath the skin. When thirty-six tried to speak, his voice stuck in his throat, swallowed by the room itself. Fifteen’s eyes narrowed.
“I hate you,” fifteen spat, though the sound wasn’t his own — it came from the air, the walls, the floor, as though reality itself held a grudge. “You’ll lose everything. You’ll drop it, just like you always do.” The words weren’t just insults; they reverberated, echoing deep inside his chest like some long-forgotten truth.
The lights in the room flickered, but there was no source — just a dimness, creeping, like the world had started to flicker out of existence.
Thirty-six turned away, desperate to escape that hatred, but there was no escape. Twenty-two stepped forward, his face half-smirking, half-flickering as if the air around him was breaking down. Invincible. Arrogant. Untouchable. Twenty-two was everything fifteen had hoped to become, and yet the sight of him felt hollow, unfinished.
“You wasted time,” twenty-two said, but it was fifteen’s voice again, lips curled in that same sneer. “You had the world, and you dropped it.”
The room tilted, as though gravity had become indecisive.
“Is that what you think?” thirty-six whispered, though even his own words felt stolen, borrowed from another version of himself.
The world lurched again. Twenty-eight appeared next to twenty-two, a look of quiet desperation carved into his features. Twenty-two laughed, though the sound was more like hollow wind, wrapping around him, spinning him in spirals.
“You thought love would last,” twenty-eight whispered, his voice like the rustle of old pages, worn and torn. “Her. You thought she would last. But you didn’t. You couldn’t.”
And then the room warped, and he was thirty-six, staring at another version of thirty-six, a reflection that wasn’t quite right. Both of them suspended in the present moment, now, though the edges of time blurred. The other thirty-six had sharper eyes, the kind of edge that felt foreign.
“You know this doesn’t end here,” the other thirty-six said. The voice was no longer human — it was a chorus, an unsettling harmony of all the selves, past and future. “You’ll keep asking the same question. And the answer won’t change.”
Thirty-six felt his breath catch. The room rippled, walls melting into something liquid, like reality itself was slipping between his fingers.
Fifty stood in front of him now, softer, though the weight in his eyes had only grown. The light in the room shifted, shadows stretching, reaching, clawing at the floor. They were no longer just shadows — they had weight, as if time had begun to manifest in physical form, pressing on his chest, his lungs.
“You’ll learn about loss,” fifty said. His voice was smooth but distant, like a message sent across light years. “More than you thought you could bear. But you’ll bear it anyway.”
“And what do I gain?” thirty-six asked, though his mouth was no longer his own — he was a mouthpiece for something older, something timeless.
Fifty didn’t answer. The silence that followed hummed, vibrating with the tension of a truth too heavy to be spoken.
Finally, eighty sat there, hunched, hands gnarled and trembling. His skin was paper-thin, veins etched like rivers beneath fragile glass. The shadows had solidified now, waiting for something, their presence undeniable.
“You’ll forget things,” eighty said softly, his voice like the final breath of an old radio, crackling and fading. “And you’ll remember things that didn’t matter.” His eyes, veiled with far-off understanding, locked onto thirty-six’s. “In the end, it’s the same. The forgetting. The remembering. It doesn’t matter.”
The room bent, the weight of time pressing in, collapsing in on itself.
And then time folded — all of it — the past, the present, the future, all the versions of himself merging into one. He was all of them and none of them. Fractured. Whole. Suspended in that place between what was and what could have been.
For a moment, the walls disappeared. The selves faded, the room crumbled, and all that was left was thirty-six, standing alone in a void so vast it held the entire universe.
Was this the price of knowing? Or the reward? He couldn’t say.
And the room vanished.
He was standing in his life again — here, now, thirty-six, as he had always been. But something had shifted.
He looked into the mirror, and for the first time, he saw all of himself — not just the present, but the fragments of every version. He knew them now, and they knew him.
Was this a gift? Or a curse? The question would remain, hanging like the last breath of a dying star.
The answer, somewhere, would always be just out of reach.
