You’re not meant to fix what happens in the time loops. Doctor’s orders, and that comes even before they give you the survey and the spiel and the confidentiality speech. The psych fiddles with his tablet in his cozy, yellow-couch office, and talks to you in a very grave and condescending voice. The tone checks out. What doesn’t check out is how young you are, and how long this is meant to take.

“One year with meds and therapy,” he says. “One month if we do a more interventionist approach. Take some time off work. I’ll write you a note.”

“Sure,” you say. You can’t take time off work. There’s a client who’s a nut, the project’s on optimizing company debt (the good kind,) which is funny considering all your college debt (the bad kind,) and you’re hoping the psych won’t talk about billing, just forgets it somehow, but come on. Don’t kid yourself. He absolutely will.

The psych gives you a sympathetic look. He’s reading you wrong for the first time in the session.

“Just be safe and close them up,” he says. “They’re just memories, in the end.”

Some Yale professor came up with it first. Trauma as a return to a point of singularity. Except, of course, the theory didn’t account for how everyone had multiple loops, not singular, which meant there had to be multiple break points in a life. Multiple folds of time.

But the much more important, much more deliciously sensitive second problem was that no one could really agree on what trauma meant. The word had leapt into the English lexicon somewhere in the 80s, and all of a sudden everyone was pasting it on psych journal headlines, and then quoting it on Google searches, and then labeling it on Discord channels.

And the theorists said: well, there’s feminine trauma and POC-trauma and poverty trauma, but it’s only understandable if you have the Right Kinds of Words to talk about it.

And the therapists said: actually, it’s about BPD, ADHD, PTSD, c-PTSD, all treatable with EMDR and CBT and DBT, but only if you have the Right Kinds of Money to pay for it.

And the influencers said: no, I’m traumatized because of X, Y, Z, and A, B, C, and you and I are too different except for when we’re the same and not different, and have the Right Kinds of Feelings to have about it.

So there you go. Trauma of the everyday. Trauma of slavery. Trauma of the parents (always the parents,) but the truth is, time loops have been there since the start. People vanish into them. People never come back out. And it was a business guy who helped put the pieces together, after his wife vanished into a loop one day, because he followed her in.

They were caught in the morning where everything could have gone right. Breakfast on the table, sunshine through the windows, and their son preparing to drive off to school for the millionth time in a row. But what if his kid had taken a wrong turn that day? What if the driver hadn’t run that light? What if his mother had begged and pleaded and sobbed and threatened and apologized and screamed and asked for him to stay home, please, please, just listen to your mother for once?

Well, she succeeded this time. Their son stayed home on the final loop. And that driver didn’t hit him, and he didn’t end up in a wreck of a Honda on the side of the road, tires spinning, classes missed, parents destroyed. And when his wife was holding their grumbling son for the first time in a decade, the business guy saw the singularity begin to close around them like an envelope.

He jumped back out. She didn’t follow. And for the rest of his life, time loops appeared in the corners of his home, regret after regret after regret. And even though he took all the pills he could, and said all the therapeutic platitudes he needed to say, in the end, he walked into a loop, too.

So there, the case studies said. It’s the trauma.

And it all makes sense. But the only thing you think about as you buy thirty dollars’ worth of meds, and call up the tempo-therapist on the thick white card, and watch yet another singularity coalesce next to your dying houseplants, weird and swirling like someone’s stirring the air with a stick, is how much work you’re going to fucking miss.

And what to tell your dad.

The crazy thing is, you’re not from a terrible background. You had one parent who’s a lawyer and another parent who’s a biologist-turned-homemaker, and sure, you were bullied for reading too much in class, and for wearing a ponytail so low it made you look like a Founding Father, but that’s small stuff. That’s daily-life stuff. They didn’t even make fun of your home-cooked Chinese lunch in school.

Seriously. They didn’t.

So it’s not actually a surprise when you touch the first singularity, the one hidden underneath a jumble of folded clothes, and find yourself transported into your nine-year old body, which has just been stuffed into a brown paper tunic and had a mustache drawn across its face.

You’re in a Birth-of-Jesus play. You’re the Roman Guard threatening the defenseless infant-savior. You’re at that perfect precipice of childhood where you’re not quite why you don’t want to go onstage, but the applause is dying down, the lights are coming on, and you are totally about to learn, for the first time, what the phrase “abject humiliation” means.

“Shit,” you say, and take a step back and call your therapist.

Her name is Kelly. She walks you through it. You swallow two pills, step onstage, and focus on the present: her firm voice through the speaker and the aftertaste of sour plum juice in your mouth.

And it goes well. You say the magic phrases, you focus hard on sour plums, and the time loop dissolves around you like a—well. Like a bad memory. You’re left standing in your bedroom, feeling stupid, smelling acetone on your lip, and holding a plum juice bottle in your hand. You’re shaking, too, leftover stage-jitters. But you’re not meant to fix things. It isn’t meant to be perfect.

“I’m so proud of you,” Kelly says when it’s done. “I just wanted you to know that.”

And if you were any other Asian kid with parental issues, you’d tear up now because no one’s ever been proud of you, ever. It’s the curse of the continent. The black magic brought over the border. Thou Shalt Never Know Thy Parent’s Validation, big carved Chinese letters, commandment number eleven.

But that’s not true. Dad’s said “I’m proud of you” plenty of times. So you’re just another Asian kid with a consulting job and an okay life, and so you say, very normally: “Thanks. I’ll call you if there’s another.”

“Here when you need me,” Kelly says, kindly, and lets you hang up first.

Back when you thought you wanted an English degree, you wrote a paper on textual singularities. The course talked about how there wasn’t a word for “trauma” back in the day, and so people just went around calling things a “calamity.” Floods? A calamity. Fires? A calamity. Memories of a husband who died in the war? Also a calamity. Calamity this, calamity that. What was once a calamity becomes the everyday. What was once a flood becomes a ceaseless rain.

And in the poem you studied, the narrator lay in bed, mourning her lost love. Maybe she was in a loop. Maybe she was not. But it did rain every day, and it did not stop.

You linked it back to time—argued that the structure of the poem was a loop in itself. That grief made time spiral, made it a non-linear entrapment of the bio-social past. Read enough books and you can tell a story about anything, including what happens in a singularity. But in all the scientific papers, a singularity is a single point: no start, no end. The zeroth dimension, complete unto itself.

A place where time approaches eternity.

You visit your Dad on the second week of meds. They haven’t affected you much—just made the singularities easier to see, so you don’t trip over one when you’re brushing your teeth or something.

Dad takes the news badly. Dad lives in a second-story walkup that he wishes was on the first story. Dad keeps a single cactus alive that you gave to him on his fifty-fifth birthday. Dad’s had three people in his family (your family, you guess,) vanish into time loops. It was the third-leading, non-natural cause of disappearances in the Revolution and the Famine, because people simply walked into the loops and didn’t come back out. Entire families vanished overnight for the chance to live without regrets. And there was no tempo-therapy back in the day, so it begins when Dad says, in Chinese:

“Oh no! Meds?”

“It’s fine, Dad,” you say. “I just did my first session with them last week. The Jesus play. Remember that?”

“I don’t care about some Jesus,” he says.

“America’s a religious country,” you say. But still, Dad’s shuffling around now to clean up the couch for you to sit on. He doesn’t talk about his sister, or your grandmother, but when there’s tea on the table, and hawthorn candy in your mouth, he says, quietly:

“Is it something I did?”

“God, Dad,” you say. “No.”

“It was your Mom’s birthday recently.”

“And?”

“I worry about her,” he says. “She’s threatened to go into a loop before.”

“Dad,” you say, “I am not going into this,” and he gets the message and stops talking. But he’s silent for the rest of the evening, doesn’t even play cards with you and his girlfriend at the end of the night. He just sits on the couch and eats hawthorn candy. Soon he starts wiping his eyes. And yep, that’s your cue—you get up and pull on your jacket, and shut the front door without force, and for the entire way back, you try not to think about how he’s more concerned about your Mom going into a time loop, and not you.

Not that you will, of course. But it’s the misplaced concern that aches. And that night, when you get back to your fifth-story walkup in New York, New York, baby, of course you open the door to a singularity on the table, tilted towards you like a welcome home.

This one’s beautiful. It’s thin on the bottom and widens up to a tessellation around the top and center. You paw around for your phone and hit dial as you admire it from the doorjamb.

“Hey there,” Kelly says. “Another one, then?”

“Yeah,” you say. “This’ll be quick, I hope,” and you touch the tessellation and blink away tears, and this is it: your first breakup.

You’re disappointed. You thought you were over this already. But nope, it’s definitely prom night, and you’re definitely sitting next to each other under the stars, empty bleachers over the football field. You rented this dress with a service online. You did your hair in a bun for once. And he’s driven over from the local college to dance with you all evening, lights, disco, action, and to tell you at the end that he’s been cheating on you.

“She’s from your class?” you ask stupidly.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’m sorry. I also think college just changes you, logically.”

So there’s the singularity. That one sentence. You’re still a kid. So is he. But you’re also about to punch him, you’re about to stab your high heel through his foot, you’re about to cry and scream and do some very illogical things, just to show him what’s up, female rage, when Kelly says, into your ear: “Take a deep breath and count to three. Do not fix the loop. Accept it as it is. This is what happened. This is in the past.”

And you do it. You count to three, through your teeth, and High School Boyfriend disappears into the stars behind you both. He doesn’t deserve that kind of metaphor. But what the hell, you read too much anyways, and Kelly’s voice talks you down, and you’re back at your doorjamb sobbing into your sleeve as the tessellation dissolves into nothing, and you realize what the shape reminds you of: the flowers he bought you on prom night.

So that’s why tempo-therapists are on your speed-dial. They talk people off the edge. They’re very good at what they do. And since the introduction of tempos, time loop disappearances have gone way down. But tempo-therapists are tough to train, and not all cultures think time loops are about trauma this, calamity that. So it makes sense that China doesn’t have them yet. It makes sense your Mom wouldn’t be seeing one, either.

It goes like this:

You get the news at a conference, two years after you’re done with meds and reality’s settled back into its familiar groove. Mom’s vanished into a time loop, Dad says over the phone, and he’s crying for the first time in years, sobbing so hard he can’t speak. You excuse yourself from the presentation, knowing your thesis advisor’s going to be quietly disappointed in a “this really can’t happen again” kind of way, but Dad’s crying, your hands are cold, and all you can think about is: I wonder what she saw.

I wonder what she saw. I wonder what she regretted. I wonder what she wanted to fix so much that she threw away everything after the divorce and her kid not talking to her and her parents dying when she was eighteen, and just walked straight into the zeroth dimension.

You can guess, but it seems disrespectful to assume. Maybe she’s alive, and she’s happier than she ever was. In any case, the funeral’s held on a mountain, where two of your grandparents and three of your great-grandparents are buried, and you make the flight there and lay flowers on her grave. It’s empty, of course. But Dad’s there, and he’s crying, and it just fucks you up completely to see him cry, and so you bow.

You bow three times. You kowtow nine times. You place ten white chrysanthemums next to your mother’s vertical, gold-carved name. Your dad asks you to speak at the funeral. You tell him you’re tired from jet lag. But the truth is you both know that she wasn’t a great Mom. And that’s all you remember about it.

It takes a while for the next few loops to close. Sometimes it doesn’t work, and you find yourself standing there like an idiot, wrist-deep in a singularity, your throat tight and hot, and Kelly says: “Make yourself a warm drink! We’ll try again another day.”

So you do, and you do, and the work hiatus goes on. It’s not a good feeling. You lie in bed thinking about loops and floods, the snow coming down and sleeping in drifts on the street outside, and your job keeps tick-tick-ticking without you. All those worker bees on the clock; all that motion. You need to go back soon. Your debt weighs on you invincibly, crushing you flat, but going back to consulting feels like dragging yourself into a grave. It feels like never drinking chocolate again, never reading poetry again, and so you grab your laptop and start applying to other jobs. Any jobs. Please, oh please, dear fucking God, and then you land on the idea of graduate school, law school, medical school, but all of that seems even more ridiculous.

And besides. Debt is debt.

You talk to Kelly about it one night, and her voice echoes through the phone. “You’re reliving mistakes happening before your eyes. The desire to fix things doesn’t go away, so you’re applying it to your life, right now. It’s the most normal thing in the world.”

“But what if this becomes a loop in the future?” You ask. “What if I never get out of this later on?”

“Do you think that will happen soon?”

“Well,” you say, and “Maybe.”

“Okay,” she says. “I’m going to ask you to qualify that ‘maybe.’ ”

She does. You do. The answer’s all garbled up, but she drags it out of you eventually, like back when you thought you actually had a chance at med school, or back when you put on makeup for the first time and your Dad laughed, or back when the family dog died in China when you were still in the States, because you weren’t ever going back to Beijing, not ever. The little guy slept at the door of your empty bedroom for five years straight. He never gave up on seeing you again, and oh, now that’s regret.

You get through it all in one go. You’re a wreck by the time she’s through. So she tells you it must be hard. So she tells you your feelings are valid. So you hang up and open up your camera roll, and spend a long time looking at the photo of your dog gumming on an orange dinosaur toy, and then you cry so hard that your lungs ache. You were the one who gave up. He waited for you for the rest of his life. If only you hadn’t been such a coward about going back, maybe he’d be alive, because you would’ve paid for any vet. You would’ve given anything to go back.

The sleep, when it comes, is in fits. The grief comes in dredging waves. And when you wake up the next morning with your eyes swollen, all the pain numbing you from the inside out, you compose and write a clipped little email to tell Kelly you’ve found another therapist, and you’re switching to them instead. Pushing past boundaries is inappropriate. You weren’t a good fit in the end. Anyways, thanks for everything, wish you well, best-regards, signature here.

Of course, it’s a lie. You haven’t bothered to look. But Kelly emails back asking for a session to clear up misunderstandings, and you shift-click-delete, and congratulations! That’s that. So you buy yourself a drink. You call work and tell them you’re coming back. You go to work and pay off your bills, and just when you start feeling peace for the first time in months, the singularities start popping up all across your apartment.

The couch twists into itself. The walls come sliding to the floor. In the end, it’s only by luck that your Dad visits one day, and catches you stepping into the swirl that’s taken over your closet. Your dog always liked messing with your socks. You can scratch the little guy’s chin if you reach out. He licks your hand, eyes filled with the irrepressible happiness of seeing you at last, and he’ll never sleep outside your door again. You’ll get it right this time, you’ll never have to say good-bye, but then Dad’s dragging you back out of the singularity, his grip crushing your wrist.

“Baobei! No!”

And you say “Yeah, I know,” and then “Stop, I’m fine,” and then you start crying, which causes him to say, “Think of your poor dad!” which causes you to cry harder, and oh, boy, here it really comes.

He says: “How could you do this?”

And “You were never like this when you were small.”

And “What do you want to eat tonight?”

And “Your Mom really does love you.”

And you say: “What in the fuck does this have to do with Mom?”

“Sweetie!” he says. “Don’t say that,” and you both listen to your sobs. Your dad’s sixty-three years old this year. Your dad keeps hawthorn candy on his tea table just in case you visit. Your dad survived the Revolution and the Famine and has never had a time loop appear in his life.

You sit down. He boils hot water for you both. You drink it, and let the real apology unstick from your throat. He tells you he loves you, and the next day, he shows up at your door with paper towel rolls and a spare lamp because he thinks your eyesight is getting worse, and takes you to the library the way he did when you were a kid.

You borrow two books. You borrow ten books. You borrow so many books you guys can barely get them up the stairs in one trip. And it’s all the stuff you’ve wanted to read for ages: Keats and Rilke and Lao She and Marquez, and you spend your weekends and your weeknights burning through the pages. You’re looking for a kindred spirit. You’re looking for someone to understand. And they get it, they all do, but it’s Wikipedia that tells you that Keats was depressed for most of his (very short) life. Keats never lived happily ever after with his one true love. And Keats actually died of tuberculosis, not a time loop, and if you think about it, the reality is: most people don’t succumb to a loop.

Walking into a loop is an active decision.

Walking into a loop is the fifth-highest cause of disappearances in the U.S.

And walking into a loop isn’t a disease of weakness. Not really. It’s a disease of pain, of conviction, of regrets so deep, you have to believe, full-heartedly, that you can fix things. You have to believe in it more than you believe in yourself. More than you believe in reality.

If only things could be better.

If only.

So you read about Keats again. You read about time again. You laugh at the language he uses, and you cry a little more, maybe for the girl you used to be, and maybe for all those years you can’t remember as a kid, where all you knew was how to read poetry on the school bus and hope that going home that day wouldn’t hurt so bad. And when the next singularity appears, you go down the list of approved NYC tempo-therapists on Temporality Today. You pick a handful who are POC. You call them with your good-patient voice. And when you find one who doesn’t talk down to you, or pretend they have more degrees than they do, or panic when you stay silent just to see what happens, you walk up to a singularity and try again.

And it’s not fast. It’s even less fun. But when you think of stanzas instead of numbers, and mutter through poetry as the loop flows into and over you, waterfalls into rivers, your therapist isn’t lying when they say you’re doing what works. They hope you can talk to your Dad more. They hope you can read more poetry as well.

It still feels too personal to disclose. The dog, the Keats, and the calamity-singularities of it all. But they’re not wrong. You hope so, too.

“Sure,” you say. “I can do that. Reading poetry.”

And it is poetry, really. Because the thing about singularities, or time loops, or trauma cycles, is that no one wants to know what you want to take back. It’s weird. It’s private. It’s all the things you thought would never get to you.

So you’ve got to make some meaning out of it all. Delve deep into your guts and pull it all out, flip the interiority of pain on its head. And what you’re doing is rearranging it, letting others witness the strange private pain of it, because that makes it public and therefore real. Maybe that’s what the tempo-therapists are; maybe that’s what loops do for your life. They force everything out into the open. It’s just an eternal witnessing, a private calamity made public, then dissipating into everyday until—there’s nothing you want for at all.

Really. Nothing.

Nothing but the sky above you, a strong blustery blue, when you’re a normal Asian kid in Beijing, which is where you maybe-not-really-somehow belong, and when all you want to do is read poetry on the school bus, or chase your dog with your Dad, and drink sour plum juice from a big glass bottle without the taste of rain.

The last loop appears when you’re slipping on your snow boots, on the fifth week of treatment. You’re looking at applications to graduate school for literature, you’re hanging onto your job by the fingernails, and it is, beyond all belief, Chinese New Year. Your Dad’s cooked some egg dumplings for dinner tonight, a homemade Revolution recipe, and you’re just about to grab your keys when you see it.

The singularity shimmers. This one sits on the floor, like a puddle, which could’ve been a nasty surprise if you stepped into it socks-first. You pocket your keys and consider it. You’re off project tomorrow, and the loops are closing quick. There shouldn’t be many left, and so you hit dial and press the hot screen of your phone to your ear.

“Good evening,” your tempo says. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

Yes, you say, definitely ready, and you pop a hawthorn candy into your mouth, you step into the puddle with your boots on, and then you’re back home.

Oh, you knew this was coming. It’s part of every Asian American kid’s story, isn’t it? The real home. The big return-to-sender. The food-as-a-metaphor-for-parental-love kind of beat. You could say more, but actually—you just want to take it all in.

China. Beijing. The kitchen. Everything is as you remember it: the luminous blue wok open on the stove, the pebbled plastic refrigerator with its Disney stickers, the bottles of chili and vinegar standing like chess pieces on the countertop. Red clay powder sits by the sink. A hot water machine huddles next to the toaster.

And your Mom is standing by the stovetop, stirring a small pot of chopped cabbage.

She’s wearing a red checkered apron, and her hair is the same bun as yours. This isn’t the last time you saw her, not really, but it’s certainly one of the last. You had a huge fight over this, absolutely cataclysmic, right before you left for the airport—but hey. This isn’t that moment. This is a good moment. One of the few good moments you’ve had with her in your life.

“If you add sugar and salt,” she says in Chinese, without turning around, “the cabbages release their juices, and there’s no need to put water in.”

“Really,” you say. “That’s so cool.”

“What do you mean, cool?” she says. “Stop standing around and taste some already.”

You walk up to the stovetop. You taste the cabbage leaf at the end of the long chopsticks, and you don’t look at her face. You know what she looks like. Why remind yourself of it? Your tempo’s talking into your ear, but you know the spiel already. So you do the whole mindfulness thing, make sure you’re still wearing snow boots, thank them profusely, and tap the hang-up button on your phone.

You chew and swallow the cabbage.

“There,” your Mom says. She’s proud of herself. “How do you like the taste?”

You think about it. You taste cabbage and hawthorn and too much salt and sugar. You can’t say anything bad, really, because she’s sensitive to that and you want this good moment to last forever. There were so few of them with her. So rare, they were singularities. Twenty-five years of daughterhood and motherhood, all gone, subsumed into something you can’t even bring yourself to remember, nothing you can ever fix, and all you have is this one little loop together, puddling on the carpet over your square-tile New York floors.

The tiny kitchen. The cold ashy Beijing air. The limestone crusts on the bottom of the glasses. The stupid fucking cabbage.

It’s like reading poetry on the school bus. You just keep doing it, and you keep believing you’re going somewhere better than you were, somewhere far away, but sometimes you’ll come back to the same spot on the page, and the words be there like they always were.

“Well?” your Mom asks. She’s getting impatient like she always does.

“I like it fine,” you tell her.

And it’s seriously the truth.

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