X's second-to-last entry roots me to the spot for a long, ringing, and utterly silent moment. I don't even know how much time passes before I take another breath, let alone move, let alone lift my eyes from the page.

Grade six is gone.

It's such a small detail, compared to the bracelet. Such a small, insignificant, throwaway line, but it disassembles me in a way even the bracelet didn't manage to. Or maybe that was just my mind trying to protect itself from reality. It's hit me all at once now, but really bit by bit over the six days I've been reading these journal entries. I'm more than halfway through the third notebook. Third of four. The date of the entry I'm on is somewhere in the range of eight and a half years ago: both X and M wrote a lot in their final days together.

Then X carried on alone.

I need confirmation. There have been so many strikes already—a mountain of evidence—but the part of my brain that still wants this to not be true needs one more thing to confirm it. And so I lift that smooth, heavy, grey-bound notebook and begin to flip rapidly, watching the handwriting.

Watching the handwriting change.

The dates tick up quickly as the pages fly by. I reach the end and open the fourth and final notebook. At the end of it, I find what I didn't want to, and the rest of my world crumbles.

The handwriting there—X's handwriting—is my own.

There's no friend here. There's no person for me to find.

I'm alone.

But it's not the end of the story yet. My hands shake as I return to the grey notebook and pick it up again. There's a part of me, now, that needs to know what happened in the intervening years. Years for which I have very little memory, and when it comes to anything identity-related, no memory at all.

The next few journal entries are daily, but fractured into chunks. These continue with regularity to the end of the third notebook, but when I open the fourth one, three months have passed. I check the dates again. For a moment, I'm scared there's a missing book somewhere, but the date range inside the cover of the fourth book starts where the third one left off, even if its first entry is three months later. Like X was trying to glean some sense of continuity from a situation fractured beyond repair. A life so discontinuous, the most complete record of it is split into the journal entries of two people across a small collection of notebooks hoarded in a bedside-table drawer. My own memories certainly don't fill the gaps there.

Of course they don't. I only have half of them. X's half.

And not even all of those. Near the start of the final, once-again-blue journal, X mentions that even the memories they thought were their own have thinned and faded, no longer supported by the buttressing stability of two harmonized minds. One mind, split in two, but I don't believe that was the full story. I think M was real, somehow. To some degree. And I think X knew it, too.

They only ever call it "the split" in their later entries. But once, in a particularly devastating, later-night spiral, they call themself a murderer.

I still don't remember writing these journal entries. The bits and pieces that haunted me earlier, like X's world showing up in my dreams, are all confined to the earlier journals. I'm beginning to suspect those are the core pieces that M mentioned once. The ones they said would come back to haunt X even if M died. I'm not sad about it. But I know X would be.

But X isn't here anymore.

By the middle of the lighter blue journal, they're happy. Almost too happy, at times, like they're convincing themself that they're happier than they actually are. Their project to change themself, meanwhile, is working. And not just working; it's working well. Really well. They throw themself into it with the energy of guilt and grief and trying to escape something, and it yields results, month over month, tracking the progress of an entire year. I spot skills I've leaned on all through my undergrad. Skills I feel like I've had forever, but know I haven't, but have never remembered gaining.

Yet under all that happiness, there's a deeper undercurrent. Little glimpses that all is not well in X's world, even as they convince themself otherwise. Near the middle of the final notebook, I find an entry consisting of a single line, scribbled out so violently, it takes three lines to contain it. A few months later, they do it again. Whatever is underneath the scribbles is short, but unreadable. I try for half an hour with different techniques—even holding the page up to every kind of light I have access to—but eventually have to give up.

Sometimes X's panic over losing M's skills returns. They double down on those, then, donning an almost detached, practical voice while they lay out their plan, over and over, just different iterations of the same thing. And then, slowly, that voice becomes the dominant one. I recognize it.

This is how I write.

It still haunts me, reads a line near the back of the book. I know what it's talking about. It's always the same when X begins a line like this, without elaborating. It's been a year now, and those memories still haven't recovered.

Maybe it's better to just forget.

And then I turn the page one last time, and the journaling stops.

I still show up to class the next day. It's part of my routine now, more than anything: a single, stable thing to cling to. Listening is easier than it was half a week ago. I fiddle more slowly with my pen, but it's not because I've stopped fiddling. There's just nothing in my head to fiddle in time to. No racing thoughts. Just... shock, I guess.

I feel numb. Numb all over.

Numb inside, too.

Ophelia sits in her usual seat at the other end of the front row, taking notes, but she's not the Ophelia I knew for so many years. I mean, she is. She's still normal. But that means she's just... normal. The most normal popular girl I know. There's never been anything that drew me to her other than that: she was the ultimate test in X's game, which has become my game, played for years without any real memory of when or how it started. Because it wasn't me who started it.

There's a crack around Ophelia. The iridescent kind, opalescent and beautiful. And I know this time, it was me who put it there.

I leave the lecture hall by the same door I almost always have. People move out of my way through the hallways, all the way to the freedom of the world outside.

My phone buzzes. It's a text from one of my board-game buddies, who I wouldn't call a friend. Ophelia's going to be at games night again this week. Are you going to do it? We can help!

I stare at the text for a long time. People flow around me down the stairs of the university building, and eventually I step aside. I swing over the railing and sit on the stone edge of a flower planter, just watching the text, then the washed-out blue sky overhead. Some people throw glances at me as they descend the stairs, but nothing in me tries to respond to it.

At last, I look back at my phone screen. I've left it so long, it's gone dark again.

No, I text back.

I already deleted Ophelia's number that you got me, is what I don't say. I'm not interested anymore.

I never was; just pretending. Or maybe there was a point where even I thought it was genuine. It's hard to know when I can barely remember who I was a year ago, on any year, on a seemingly ongoing basis. Like some side effect of this whole becoming-a-new-person thing is permanent and ongoing memory loss about who I was and what I was doing in any previous iteration. That's really what I've become now. Iterations. Different model numbers of an evergreen software, years in a decade, versions of an AI. I'm still constantly improving. I can give X that, at least.

I wonder, if they could see me, if they'd like what they saw.

I turn my phone off completely and slip it into the back pocket of my bag even though it will remain silent all the way home. I don't even know if I'll go to games night this week. I might visit dad instead. Ask him where he got that bedside table. I probably already know the answer to that... in my old room. I barely remember what that room looked like, but dad might have pictures that I don't.

An ache in my chest starts low at that thought, but intensifies over my walk home, until I trudge up the stairs to my apartment with a knot in my throat threatening tears. I'm not usually emotional. But the thought of skipping games night does something strange to me, unlocking a little pocket of grief I didn't know existed, if it even did before.

Just half a week ago, I'd thought I might be able to find someone like me in my city. Someone I could confide in, be myself with, and still belong beside.

That person turned out to be me.

I shut my door behind me and lean against it as the world slow-spins. It's profoundly disorienting. For a moment, I'm not sure who or where or when I am, as years meld and the dates of journal entries blur past my eyes. I don't remember today's date, or even what year it is, for a moment. Then the year at least returns. I check my phone for the date, but I turned it off. And I don't want to turn it on again.

I step away from the door and hold onto the wall while I shuck off my outdoor wear. I leave it in a heap on the floor. Then I drop to the couch and open my laptop to check today's date. That grounds me.

I'm here, today, at home. I know those three things. The who question remains unanswered. I grab a couch pillow and hug it, letting myself lie facedown as the silence reopens the question I've been battering around for days. Asking without an answer, and maybe without a hope of one. I don't know who I am anymore. I was a single person, once. Then I was X and M. X wanted to be someone else. M wanted to hold onto the core of who we already were.

X won.