Ever driven home and not remembered the drive? That’s how whole years go missing.

Autopilot is useful and quietly expensive. Familiar routes and familiar days get handled by the part of you that lays down no memory, so the time passes correctly and leaves no trace, and later you cannot account for a whole stretch of it. Nothing went wrong. Nothing got recorded either.

Break the loop in small ways. A different way home, a new place to sit, one thing a week you have never done. Novelty is what makes time stick, which is why a strange week feels longer in memory than a smooth month.