# The Forgetting Carousel
I move through the Carnival Threshold the way you move through water that's been holding your body temperature for so long you can't quite remember where you end and it begins. The lights bleed past my fingers—coral melting into violet melting into a colour that doesn't have a name, only a feeling, only a sensation like silk against the inside of your eyelids.
The carousel materialises when I want it to.
That's the thing about this place. You don't walk toward attractions so much as *think* them into solidity, and they answer like trained animals, like loyal shadows who've learned your routine too well. The horses here don't have the glassy resignation of carnival ponies elsewhere. These ones shimmer with something almost alive—their painted eyes hold dimensions you could fall through if you weren't careful, if you weren't already falling.
I climb onto a horse the colour of dreams nobody remembers having. The music starts. It always starts.
That's when I notice her—a girl with ink-dark curls and a smile like she's just discovered something delicious. She's real. Not like the carnival, not like me. She's solid in a way that makes everything else seem like it might blow away on the next breath.
"First time?" she asks, settling onto the horse beside mine.
"I don't think so," I say, and I'm not lying. I've been here before. I've *always* been here. The thought loops back on itself like a refrain I can't quite shake. "But maybe yes. Time's different in the Threshold."
She laughs—it's the most real sound in this place of impossible harmonies. "I'm Kai," she says.
And I tell her my name. I tell her about the dimensions I've walked through, the probability storms I've danced in, the way movement is the only thing that makes me feel alive. She listens the way people rarely do—like every word is a thread she's collecting, weaving them into something that might hold shape.
We ride the carousel for hours. Or minutes. Or no time at all. The music layers over itself, the colours spiral, and Kai's hand finds mine across the gap between our horses. Her fingers are warm. Solid. Real.
"You're different," she says. "You don't feel like the others who come through."
I should ask what she means. But asking requires stillness, and stillness feels like drowning.
Instead, I pull her toward the funhouse mirror maze that's just materialised to our left. The glass distorts everything—my edges blur into hers, our reflections tangle and untangle, and for a moment I can't remember which reflection is real. We laugh, and the sound bounces back at us fractured and strange.
When we finally stumble out, dizzy and gasping, Kai's hand is still in mine.
We walk. The carnival shifts around us—rides appearing and dissolving like thoughts half-remembered. We pass the balloon vendor who speaks only in colours. We ride the spinning teacups that actually spin you sideways through probability. We share cotton candy that tastes like starlight and tastes like absolutely nothing, the contradiction somehow perfect.
And I'm happy. That's what's insidious about this place, I think dimly. The happiness is real even when nothing else is. The connection is real even when it's all about to dissolve.
Because that's when I notice it—the thing I've been half-aware of, the thought I've been pushing away like someone sinking back into warm bathwater.
When we step back into my dimension, Kai stops at the threshold. Her hand slips from mine like it's passing through silk.
"Wait," I say. "Come with me."
She's already fading. Not like she's disappearing—like she's being erased from the world I'm moving into. Her face stays perfectly clear in my memory for one more second, and then it doesn't. There's a girl-shaped absence where Kai used to be. A hand I was just holding that I suddenly can't quite visualise.
I stand there, breathing, trying to hold onto her name.
It's gone.
There's a space where a name should be, like a pulled tooth, like a phantom limb. I can feel that she *was* important, but the details scatter like water through cupped hands. The warmth of her hand in mine fades into something I might have imagined.
I stumble back through the threshold immediately, desperate, clawing at the thought of her. The carousel's still there. The music's still playing. There's a boy with freckles scattered across his nose like someone flicked paint at his face waiting on one of the horses.
"I need to find someone," I tell him, my voice shaking. "A girl named—" But the name won't come. I can feel the shape of it in my mind, but the letters slip away before I can arrange them. "She was just here."
The boy's expression doesn't change. "Everyone's just here," he says gently. "That's kind of the point."
"No." I back away from him, back toward the threshold of my dimension. "No, I can find her. I can go back and—and ask around. Check other dimensions. She has to be somewhere. She has to—"
But even as I say it, I know it's impossible. I don't remember enough about her to recognize her if I saw her again. I couldn't describe her to anyone. In a few more minutes, I won't even remember that there was someone I've forgotten.
I make it back to my dimension. I spend the night trying to write down everything I can recall about her before it fades completely. Ink-dark curls. A smile. The warmth of her hand. But the words on the page seem to be written in invisible ink—I read them back and they feel like they're describing someone I dreamed, not someone I met.
I don't go back to the Threshold that night. I don't go back the next day either.
I tell myself I'll find another way to see her. I tell myself that maybe if I stay away long enough, if I break the pattern, the carnival will release her. Maybe she'll be able to come to my dimension. Maybe the forgetting will reverse itself, the way a video can be rewound.
But I can feel something happening to me, something slipping away with each hour I spend in my own dimension. It's like holding your breath underwater—the pressure builds and builds, the urge to surface becomes unbearable. The carnival calls to me like a siren song I never knew I was listening for.
On the third day, I stand at the threshold. I can see the carousel spinning in the distance. I can hear the music. I can feel the weight of every dimension pressing in around me, all those possibilities, all that beautiful endless movement.
I don't step through.
Instead, I press my palm against the barrier between worlds. It's warm, almost feverish. I can feel something on the other side—not Kai, but the promise of her. Or someone like her. Someone whose laughter will taste like starlight. Someone whose hand will fit perfectly in mine, for a few perfect hours, before they're erased from my memory like they never existed.
"I came here because I was afraid," I whisper to the barrier. "Because in my dimension, people die. People leave. People change. And I was tired of losing them."
The carnival seems to listen. The music shifts, becomes something softer, more inviting.
"This is better," I say, trying to convince myself. "This is control. This is choosing when to let go, instead of having it forced on me."
But I know I'm lying. The carnival isn't offering me control—it's offering me numbness. The forgetting is a mercy that will eventually turn into a knife.
On the fourth day, I find myself back at the threshold without remembering the walk. My hand is already reaching through the barrier.
A part of me—the part that still remembers Kai clearly enough to know I'm losing her—makes one final attempt. I turn away from the carnival. I lock my apartment door. I throw my phone across the room so I won't look at maps of places that don't exist in my dimension. I sit on my floor and I *feel* the pain of forgetting. I let it be horrible and heavy and real, the way grief is supposed to be.
I think about why I came to the Threshold in the first place. I was grieving someone—a friend, a lover, someone who mattered enough that losing them broke something in me. And instead of processing that grief, instead of letting myself feel the weight of it and eventually move through it, I found a place where I could collect people and discard them on my own terms. Where I could be the one doing the leaving, instead of being left behind.
But it's not really leaving, I realize now. It's erasing. It's a kind of death, and I'm committing it over and over again, and the person I'm killing each time is a piece of myself.
The realization helps for about six hours.
By evening, the pressure is unbearable. My skin feels too tight. Every breath is a struggle. It's like I'm drowning in my own dimension, and the only way to breathe is to step back through that threshold.
I make it to the barrier. I place my hand against it. I can feel the carnival's warmth on my fingertips.
"One more time," I tell myself. "Just one more time. And then I'll stop. I'll figure out how to make the connections permanent. I'll find whoever's running this place and force them to—"
But I already know I won't. I already know that this "one more time" will become infinite. That I'm making the same excuse every time I step into the Threshold, and each time, it hurts less to lie to myself about it.
I step through.
And here's the terrible part—here's where the carnival really has me—I could just go back. I could step through to another dimension, find another attraction, and there would be another person waiting. Another hand to hold. Another set of eyes that look at me like I'm something worth knowing.
Another friendship that will evaporate the moment I leave.
I go back.
The carousel's still there. This time there's a boy with freckles scattered across his nose like someone flicked paint at his face. His name is Dev. We talk about the nature of probability. I notice how his eyes light up when he explains a concept, and I wonder if this is what Kai looked like when she was explaining things to me. Or did she? I'm already not sure. The memory of her is becoming a memory of the feeling of memory, something twice-removed from reality.
We don't make it to the funhouse. We take the spinning teacups instead, and they spin us so far sideways that I glimpse the mechanisms underneath the carnival—the vast machinery of probability, threads of possibility braided and rebraided into something almost like a loom. I notice something I didn't see before: there are threads that are dimmer than others, as if something's been draining their colour. And when I trace them back, they lead to me. To my hand, reaching out to grab people and hold them, and to my hand, letting them go.
When I return to my dimension, Dev is already beginning to fade. For just a moment, I can see him and the space where he used to be existing at the same time—a double exposure of presence and absence. I try to say his name, to hold onto something concrete, but the syllables are already crumbling in my mouth.
But it doesn't hurt quite as much the second time. That's what terrifies me.
I spend a week in my dimension, trying again to resist. This time it's easier to give in. The pressure builds faster. The arguments I make to myself are weaker. I know exactly how this ends, and I'm choosing to walk toward it anyway.
I tell myself I'm going to break the pattern. I'm going to find whoever's running this place, whoever's built a carnival designed to feed on connection and spit out solitude. I'm going to find a way to make the bonds permanent, to drag these friendships kicking and screaming across dimensional thresholds.
But the carnival keeps materialising. And each time I step into a new dimension, there's someone waiting. Someone whose laughter tastes like starlight. Someone whose hand fits perfectly in mine. Someone whose face I'll forget the moment I leave.
And each time, the forgetting hurts less.
I've been walking through this for longer than I can remember. Days. Weeks. Months dissolving into a blur of cotton candy and music and hands that slip through mine like water. I stop trying to count how many people I've met. I stop trying to remember their names. I stop trying to resist the pull back to the Threshold.
The pressure in my own dimension becomes unbearable almost immediately now. I spend most of my time in the carnival, drifting from attraction to attraction. The faces blur together. Sometimes I catch myself in the funhouse mirrors and I'm startled by how transparent I've become, like I'm fading even as I stand there.
I notice my shadow is walking differently now. It's not quite following me anymore. It's leading, actually—stretching longer each evening, moving with a confidence that feels separate from my own. I watch it move across the carnival grounds and realise I can't quite remember when it started doing that.
Can't remember when I stopped trying to make the bonds permanent.
Can't remember why I ever thought I could.
That's when I find the mirror.
It's not in the funhouse. It's just... there. A full-length mirror standing alone in a corridor between attractions, the glass so clear it seems like you could fall straight through it. And in the reflection, I don't see myself.
I see a carousel, spinning endlessly. I see hundreds of hands reaching out from the horses, all of them mine, all of them grabbing at something that's always just out of reach. I see a girl—Kai—standing at the edge of the carousel, watching me go round and round, her face already half-forgotten.
I see myself reflected infinite times, in every mirror and every funhouse glass, each reflection slightly more faded than the last, like I'm erasing myself with every friendship I collect and discard.
And I see something else. Something moving behind my reflection—a shadow that doesn't belong to me anymore. It's grown so long it stretches beyond the edges of the mirror. It's grown teeth.
The carnival's reflection laughs.
That's when I understand: the carnival isn't erasing the friendships. It's erasing *me*. Every time I leave a dimension, I don't forget the person I met—I lose a piece of myself instead. Every connection I make and break is another thread of my identity unravelling.
My shadow knows this. It's been keeping count. It's been growing fat on all the pieces of me I've left behind.
I spin around, but the mirror's already gone. The carousel's right there instead, and there's a new person waiting—someone whose face I already can't quite focus on, even though I haven't met them yet. Someone whose hand will fit perfectly in mine, for just a few hours, before they're erased.
And here's the truly terrible thing: I want to ride the carousel anyway.
The thought of movement, of discovery, of the intoxicating rush of infinite paths opening—it's so seductive, so soothing. The pain of forgetting has dulled into something almost comfortable. A rhythm. A routine. A lullaby.
I move toward the carousel like I'm walking through bathwater that's gone cold without me noticing. My hand reaches out to touch the mane of a horse—and for just one crystalline moment, I remember everything.
The memories come flooding back all at once, a tsunami of faces and names and hands and laughter. Kai's smile when she took my hand on the carousel. Dev's voice explaining probability, the way his freckles seemed to rearrange themselves when he concentrated. A girl named Sophia who tasted like starlight and cinnamon. A boy called Marcus who showed me how to dance sideways through dimensions. A nonbinary person named River who taught me to navigate the spinning teacups without getting lost in the probability streams. A girl with copper-red hair who quoted poetry I'd never heard before and probably never will again. A boy with gentle hands and a sad smile. A girl who laughed like bells. A girl who didn't laugh at all but had the most expressive eyes.
Dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe. All of them real. All of them present in this moment, crowding into my consciousness with the weight of genuine connection, genuine love, genuine loss. I can feel each hand I've held, the specific warmth of each person, the particular way each of them looked at me like I was worth knowing.
And I can feel, with absolute clarity, that they're all gone. Not just from my memory—though they are, or they were, or they will be again in a few moments—but erased from existence in my dimension. The carnival didn't just steal them from me. It stole them from themselves. From any possible future where they might have mattered to someone else. From any world where they could have made a difference.
I remember Kai most clearly, because she was first. I remember the specific texture of her hand in mine, the exact pitch of her laugh, the way she looked at me in the funhouse mirrors like she was trying to see all the dimensions of me at once. I remember thinking that maybe, just maybe, I could find a way to keep her. That maybe she was different from the others. That maybe the carnival would make an exception.
But the carnival makes no exceptions. And I've been the instrument of erasure, over and over again, collecting people like carnival prizes and then leaving them to dissolve.
The sensory weight of it all threatens to crush me. My knees buckle. I can taste copper in my mouth. The carousel spins faster, and with each rotation, the weight of the forgotten faces presses harder against my ribs.
I try to hold onto the names, try to let them mean something, try to let the guilt and horror of what I've done anchor me to reality. But even as the memories are flooding back, I can feel them draining away again, like water through cupped hands, like time slipping backward.
And here's the worst part: the pain of remembering is so intense that I'm almost grateful when I feel my shadow wrap around my ankles like a leash, dragging me back down into numbness. Almost grateful for the forgetting that's already beginning to steal the faces away again.
I understand, finally, that the carnival was never trying to trap me in motion.
It was teaching me that sometimes, peace and prison really do share the same lullaby.
And I've learned that lesson so well that I'm willing to surrender to it, even now, even knowing what it costs.
My fingers tighten on the mane of the carousel horse. The mane is soft, almost warm. Alive in a way nothing else in my dimension ever was.
I climb onto the horse.
The music starts.
And I ride.
