It happens mid-sentence. The pen falters.
The writer pauses, brow creased; not from the usual fatigue or looming deadlines; but from that sensation. That soft, static crackle in the back of the skull. The feeling that this word, this moment, this scene; has happened before. That he has written it before. Or maybe lived it. Somewhere. Elsewhere.
Deja vu, they call it. The strange return of the not-quite-lived.
But for a writer, it’s more than neurological residue. It is haunting.
He sets the pen down. The scene on the page; two lovers standing on a frozen lake, whispering secrets into the glassy void; feels identical to something he dreamt last winter. Or was it two winters ago? Or was it… someone else's dream? The words echo too perfectly. The dialogue is too crisp, the silence between their lines too practiced. It feels like a rerun of an episode he never wrote.
He flips back through old notebooks. Nothing.
And yet, he is certain: this story isn’t new.
They say deja vu is the brain skipping like a scratched vinyl record. The temporal lobe hiccupping. But some of us; the ones who spend their lives coaxing stories from shadows; know better.
Some of us suspect that there are other drafts of the universe. Parallel timelines where different editors made different cuts. Where scenes diverged. Where characters rebelled.
Perhaps, somewhere just beyond the membrane of this reality, there’s a version of him; another writer, nearly identical; who penned the exact same words in the exact same sequence. Perhaps they’re writing each other simultaneously, trapped in a mirrored loop of mutual creation. Or perhaps he is the character, not the author. A figment fabricated by someone who suspects nothing.
He remembers a character he wrote years ago. A girl named Mira who kept journals of moments that hadn’t happened yet. She claimed to remember future conversations, to anticipate her own death, and in her final pages, she wrote:
"I don’t think I’m real. I think someone made me and gave me a terrible gift: the ability to remember what hasn’t occurred."
She wasn’t supposed to die in that draft. He didn’t write her ending like that. It just… happened. Like she knew.
Lately, the deja vu comes more frequently. Not just scenes, but emotions. Entire moods replay like reruns: the sour taste of loss before the phone rings. The sense of a farewell before the knock at the door. The sound of the rain that’s not yet begun.
The writer starts dreaming of the people he’s written. They surround his bed. Some are pleading. Others are furious. One man just weeps and asks him why he gave him a daughter only to take her away five pages later.
He tries to stop writing, but the stories keep writing themselves. Words scrawl in his notebooks without his hand. Characters who died decades ago appear in new stories, uninvited.
One night, he opens a new file.
There’s already text on the page.
“I don’t think I’m real. I think someone made me and gave me a terrible gift…”
He blinks. The cursor blinks back.
A laugh escapes his throat, dry and cracking. A memory unfurls: not his own. A man in another world, reading those same words, feeling the same chill. Another version of him? Or the original?
He deletes the line.
It types itself again.
“Fiction bleeds twice; once in creation, once in memory.”
When they find him, the room is quiet. No signs of struggle.
Just a typewriter with a page still inked.
“I remember now. Not who I am. But who made me.”
“I remember his name.”
And beneath that, scratched in crimson; whether ink or something else; was a final sentence:
“If you’re reading this… you’ve already written me.”
Somewhere, a writer wakes up with the taste of iron on his tongue. He has an idea for a new story. He thinks it’s original. He picks up the pen.
The loop begins again!
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