At least, not during the departure.

   The pain came upon return, about half past noon, when Melody Quick woke in bed on the first of September, a day where everything was terrible and she wanted very much to die.

  Her room spun, jumped back, spun again. Unable to tolerate the resurrected summer’s light, blind-filtered as it already was, she, despite the nausea agitated hundredfold by even her tiniest movement, managed to turn herself over to face the wall, bearing as best she could the throbbings of a mind in agony, the bewilderment of a consciousness dealing with memories it knew it couldn’t possibly have—a diner, a bat, a parking lot.

  She groaned and closed her eyes.

  An hour passed before she opened them again. Her brain, though still far from any sensible configuration, had recovered just enough for a familiar anxiety to return, and in response to its persistent hum Melody turned away from the white brick wall and looked to her next objective.

  Next to the writing desk, under a beam of dust and sun, sat a stack of cardboard boxes: her belongings from home, which she mostly left alone these iterations, aside from the few occasions when she needed something specific from inside.

  This current moment being, conveniently, one such instance—as it had been with the last few Septembers, there was a certain something the Eighth demanded of her. A certain task without whose completion the month would not truly begin.

  “I’ll do it,” she said. “You know I’ll do it. Just let me rest a bit longer.”

  Which she did, for another two hours, slumped sideways on her standard-issue twin foam mattress, feet grounded to the floor, the awkward position a testament to her numerous false starts during that time, before finally leaving her bed and walking over to the boxes.

  She reached into the top most box and, even though the thing she sought was buried deep within a mess of other useless junk, fished out her desired item with unnatural ease, in a single motion, without having to so much as glance inside—because what challenge was a haystack when the needle was fixed?—and with the object of ceremony in hand, Melody began the ritual that marked the start of every iteration.

  At the foot of her door she stood, contemplating the wooden surface, studying not only the traces left behind by those who’d preceded her, the scuff marks and faded scratches, but also its inherent imperfections, such as the whorl in the grain below the peephole, that concentric pupil of a lone unblinking eye, under whose gaze she, after unscrewing the box-cutter’s safety knob and drawing the segmented blade within, twirled the edged tool baton-wise about her hand, deep in thought, superimposing imaginary contours on the blank canvas in front of her.

  Then, after a preliminary exhale, she put blade to wood. She carved deep. Shavings drifted to the floor with every stroke. She went over each curve several times for definition and when she was done she stepped back to admire her handiwork.

  Etched squarely in the middle of her door, like the outline of some decapitated corset-bound snowman, was the number 8.

  Nearing the double digits now, Melody. What's your plan? Do you even have one?

  “Shut up.” She held the blade up to her frontal lobe. “I’ll end you.”

  No, you won't.

  She tossed the knife over her shoulder, taking no note of where it landed, knowing that no matter where she threw it, it would reliably arc back like the temporal boomerang it was—like all things were now—though the days of the month to end up back in that cardboard box, as though needle and haystack were perpetual, entangled in geographies circumscribed to them by a preordination, some framework to which neither Melody nor man had means, and in the co-ed bathroom down the hall Melody’s flip-flops smacked across tiled ceramic as she walked along the row of porcelain sinks arranged under a long mirror that spanned the length of the wall. Stopping at the middle basin she turned on the faucet, cupped her hands under the cool stream and submerged her face into the pooled water in her palms, and when she couldn't hold her breath any longer she parted her hands and the water fell into the collection below, already level with the overflow.

  She turned off the tap and watched the tornado dance. Watched it shrink, watched it die. And when the water was gone she kept on staring at the drain, her head held down no longer in observation but rather in dread of what she knew came next.

  She steeled herself—breathed in, out—and then looked up.

  The mirror reflected not Melody Quick, but rather someone she'd known in another time, another life. A girl she'd once been.

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  Gone were the sunken eyes, the pallid complexion, the torn hair, the shriveled lips and withered cheeks she had worn mere hours ago in a lost future, her features having been reset to their former, healthier state. Once again she resembled, in body and face, the naive, freshly-matriculated idiot who had been so eager to begin a new stage in her life; the child who once had, before her feet, in all its splendid possibilities, an entire future to gaze upon and behold, a grand and open plain that stretched not only to but far beyond any horizon.

  But the resemblance was a lie. There was no plain, there was not even a horizon. And though to hold the impostor's gaze was torture, as unbearable as looking at a dated photograph of herself, she forced herself to peer into her false self because, after all, what—

  “—else do you deserve? What do you even think you deserve? Huh? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Look at you. You think you're me, you dumb bitch? How 'bout you take that face off or I'll take it off you. I'll reach into this mirror and beat the shit out of you. I'll give you back your real fucking face, you—”

  This self-flagellation grew more rapidly in intensity and profanity and continued on for quite some time, and was—as unreasonably long as it had lasted already—interrupted only by the sound of a toilet flushing.

  From the stalls emerged another freshman, a housemate—perhaps once a friend in some forgotten iteration, a stranger now in any case—who fled past the sinks and out the door, desperately avoiding the eyes, reversed and otherwise, of the lunatic at the sink, the door swinging closed as Melody called out after her, “You didn't wash your hands.”

  Melody towelled her face dry. She chewed on a glob of toothpaste and swallowed it and tossed her toothbrush into the trash. She walked to the row of showers, entered the stall she knew to be golden (seven months of familiarity had left her with a thorough understanding of each shower's nuances and quirks, such as how the one in the second stall from the left had an annoying tendency for its pressure to flicker between weak and strong at random intervals; or how the farthest one seemed fine until eight minutes in, after which it turned frigid), and then turned the knob to its optimal temperature.

  She locked the door and removed her clothes and placed them on the seat in the alcove. She stepped under the water and closed the curtain and reveled in the one remaining activity that still gave her any sort of pleasure: to sit under the warmth until she was dizzied from heat and dehydration, and then crank up the temperature even further until the knob stopped, and then just sit there, fetal and panting and prune-skinned, aching for some erosion of self and past and circumstance.

  And sometimes she did manage to forget. And those occurences were a mercy.

  Melody shrank into a ball on the floor, her back against the filthy tile wall, and rested her chin between her knees. She tilted her head up and swallowed a few mouthfuls of metallic boiler water. Her mind wandered.

  She thought about where she would be right now without the Void. Stressing over finals. Planning the summer with her new Uptown friends. Not worrying about the underlying cause behind (and ontological implications of) the continuing regression of all time and space.

  And, of course, she thought too, as she often did, about him.

  Because within Melody Quick there existed another loop, one whose repetitions far surpassed that of the one without, wherein an inner Melody, the next matryoshka down, made the long trip to the city where he lived and worked, to see him again for the first time in many years—to reminisce with him about their shared past, to discuss the theory of separate futures—an encounter that played and replayed itself, over and over again, whose sole outstanding permutation resided in the realm of some exterior nesting doll yet.

  And though she had come close to realizing these daydreams on many occasions during past Septembers—bags packed, ticket purchased, platform boarded—she'd always stopped just short of getting on the train itself, paralyzed by the same thought every time:

  “What if he can't do anything?”

  To which another part of her countered, quite rationally: Right, but what if he can help?

  “Yeah, but if he couldn't … I don't think I could take that.”

  Oh well, gee, okay, in that case—have fun with eternity, I guess.

  “Fuck you.”

  No, you.

  After which exchange her brain checked out entirely, leaving the vessel alone to wallow on the floor of her makeshift sauna, to soak in the warmth, to let the curative vapours defuse and untangle, cell by cell, the snarl of nerves in which all her month-end failures of composure were rooted, alongside which decomposition dissolved also her capacity for acts of self-castigation and vehicular destruction and all the other aberrant behaviours she usually indulged in around the end of each September. (Truly depraved shit, like stealing her housemates' care packages from the common room fridge, or flying kites in the courtyard in the middle of the night, or blaring Friday I'm in Love at full blast with her door open on Sunday evenings.)

  By the time she turned off the water and left the bathroom it was dark outside. She skipped back to her room and closed the door and looked at her carving. She looped her fingers over the unbroken groove of the number, tracing the curves gently to avoid splinters, and whispered to it dire threats, words seldom reserved for integers, invectives whose severities far exceeded any sensible amount one (someone sane, she supposed) would direct toward markings on wood.

  Then she turned her head up to the ceiling, as if the Void inhabited the room above her, and told it, “This month's going to be different,” her words intoned not so much in defiance as in pre-triumph, in assurance of her own victory. “You'll see.”

  And in the night she paced and hummed in wired ruminations, still buoyed by the shower's high, heart afire with hope and promise and the belief—the foreknowledge—that this iteration would be the last; that yes, tomorrow was not only another day but a month to come; and that yes, yes, she was ready, readier than she'd ever been, to fight, to tackle anything the month could throw at her, to take on once more, for the final time, the longest September of her life.