You first arrived in the woods when you chose a new name for yourself: Cindy. Cindy had no past, only a future. You cut yourself from your body like it was a diseased limb and left it to rot. When you opened your eyes, you were here, in the world inside the world.

There are many ways to do this, although you did not know them then. All involve a choice, a decision. A grasp for a place that hasn’t been born yet.

You ended up here because you no longer felt like a person, but a fungal sprout of tombstones. You left your body behind because it was not really a body but a graveyard, a sallow field of memorials to past selves, some of which were suicides, and some of which were not.

The world inside the world is a forest, thick with bright fog, as if the sun were everywhere and nowhere. The trees are heavy with lichen and strung with gristly moss. There is no true north, but you always find your way. Sound does not carry.

There is no past here. Every moment peels away like paper leaves, and nothing is remembered. It’s a warm, dull-edged sprawl well suited to long wanders. And you did wander here, your hands leaving no mark, your feet leaving no print. Far beyond the canopy, the seconds stacked like sediment in a river, destined only to turn into stone.

You drifted and flowed and eddied and one day there was another. The man uttered his name and it was lost. You studied him. Then you said it: Cindy. His brows furrowed. But the memory faded. You stared at each other across the gulf of time.

You held out your hand and wondered why you did it, and who the man was. He seemed to be made of forest, with wengewood hair and eyes like ferns. But he was definitely like you, you thought. Did he think too? Was he an illusion?

His gaze grew curious as he watched himself reach for you, too. When your fingers touched, he was gone, and you were alone again, and when you blinked, you were gone too.

When you came back, to your disgust, you possessed a body again. You sat in your apartment above the hair salon and conspired to return to the place with no past.

The rain tapped at the sill and went away again. The smell of bleach seeped up through the floor. The hours turned and then the seasons.

You called the doctor one blustery autumn day, determined to hack at your problem, and when you hung up, there was the forest, and the warmth, and the golden silence. You sat on a stump and let time fall away without collecting. But there was a whisper-thin crack in the world now because someone else had been there, an eyelash in an eye.

You stood and began to walk the trails again. You wondered if they change like you do, but that would require memory. The trails snake between the roots, smooth as glass, like eons of feet have trod them down. You don’t really have feet, do you? You exist here the way information is stored but not housed, the way a candle makes light.

Then he’s there again. You touch. You vanish.

Your body is fine. It gets you from here to there. It’s amusing to decorate. You can dye the hair and pierce the ears and needle designs into the skin. These days your body is short a few organs because of the surgery that was billed to your insurance as painful periods but really removed your capacity to make more bodies. Making more bodies is a grotesquerie, a revolting function of biology, and maybe even the worst thing that could ever happen to a person. There was no question about your decision. Those parts had to be the first to go.

If you could remove more you would. If you could replace your joints with bearings, your breasts with silicone, your spine with titanium, you would do it. You understand that this is not technologically feasible, nor ethical under capitalism, so you settle for tattoos.

You wonder about the man. You wonder if he lives in the same paper-doll body, yearning for scissors.

You figured out how to do it on purpose this time.

In the world inside the world, your body is light and manageable. It has no weight. You don’t have to feed it twice a day. It doesn’t itch, hurt, ooze, bleed, or flake. It is just a facade, a mask which eases interactions with others, which is all you need from it.

The man reads the piece of paper you brought with you this time, his eyes clear and deep. The paper is heavy because it doesn’t belong here the way you do. He nods, a motion that instantly sieves into the past. His palms are warm on your knuckles.

You can’t stop thinking about his touch. It was warm in the biological way and not in the diffuse warmth of the forest. It was pleasant. You think that experiencing pleasure is maybe the only good thing about having a body. In the far-off future, you imagine asking the surgeons to preserve only your nerves, your brain. Throw the rest away.

Your next piece of paper just says where?

The written word persists even in a place with no past, moment after moment, an arrow pierced through the sinew of time, holding it together.

His lined yellow notebook has an address written on it, a park near your apartment. That answers the question, you think, of whether the world inside the world maps to the city above. Your weightless chest buzzes as you extend your hand.

He’s warm. He’s so warm.

Your heels blister in your boots on the way to the park. The frigid air stings your sinuses. The polyester lining of your coat catches a chewed fingernail. A trail of breath crystallizes behind you, reminding you that you’re living once more at the knot of past, present, and future.

He’s sitting on a bench that sags in the middle, all sharp angles like a man sketched in pencil over an oil painting. He looks up, and his eyes are keyholes back to that place: the world inside the world, the world that is inside him, and the world that is inside you.

“Cindy,” you say.

“James.”

There’s a silent, thunderous understanding between the two of you. You stretch out your cold fingers, and he takes them, his hands bare and hot. He stands. You walk.

This world has a past. Together you have already created one, immutable as a boulder in a meadow. You will always be anchored to that park, where your body met his in a place that wouldn’t forget.

Your questions go unspoken but not unanswered. Of course he is like you. It’s in every rough step, in the sharp exhales that frost his glasses, in the click of his keys in his pocket.

You hold hands not in the way of lovers but in the way of the drowning. You arrive at a lake along the trail. The barren trees stretch up into the sky and down into the water. The sky is gray here, as if the sun is nowhere and everywhere at once.

You peer into his keyhole eyes through your mingled fog of breath. A magnetic dance of intention, your faces the dancers. Your lips meet; his eyes, closed. The wood empty; the world, full.

© 2026 C. M. Fields