LOST Chapter 2: Inventory

Read chapter 2 of LOST by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

I found seventeen things wrong before I lost the light. Seventeen is not a large number. I want to be clear about that. Given the hypothesis I had been working with for seven years, given the theoretical framework I had built across thirty-one notebooks about the nature of Misakiura's spatial instability, you might expect me to approach a confirmed world-crossing with some systematic rigor, some organized methodology. You might expect a proper experimental protocol. What I actually did was walk around my apartment in the dark for two hours opening drawers, and then I sat on the kitchen floor and ate cold rice from a container I found in the refrigerator, and then I lay on my futon without sleeping and stared at the ceiling crack and thought about all the things I should be doing and did not do them. In my defense, I had been pushed through a rupture in spacetime by someone I trusted. I think a certain amount of methodological looseness is forgivable. The seventeen things: The cup, which I have already described. I kept coming back to it throughout the day, picking it up and putting it down, and by the third time I recognized this as a behavior and stopped. The photograph on the shelf above my desk. In my apartment, the one I had woken up in that morning before any of this happened, the photograph shows me and my mother at the harbor when I was eleven, her hand on my shoulder, the shrine visible behind us. In this apartment the photograph is identical except that my mother's hand is not on my shoulder. We are standing the same distance apart. The shrine is behind us. But her hand is at her side, and the expression on her face is very slightly different, something around the eyes that I cannot name precisely and that I have spent a significant amount of time since trying to name. The books on my upper shelves. The physics and mathematics are all present, same authors, same titles mostly, but three of them are in a different order than I keep them, and one, a collection of papers on field theory that I have had since university, has a green spine in this apartment where in mine it is blue. The content, when I checked, is identical. Just the spine. The window latch on the north-facing kitchen window, which in my apartment has been broken since last winter and which I had been propping closed with a folded piece of cardboard. In this apartment the latch works. I opened and closed it four times. The view from that window. Functionally identical. The same roofline, the same narrow street below, the same neighbor's potted plants on the landing opposite. But the potted plant on the left, the one that was there when I moved in and that has been slowly dying for as long as I have lived here, the one whose decline I have watched with a distant guilt about plant ownership, is alive. Not only alive. Flowering. Small white flowers I have never seen it produce, turning their faces toward a sun that by that point in the afternoon was behind cloud anyway. The dying plant in the apartment I had woken up in that morning was not flowering. This one was. I stood at the kitchen window for a while looking at those flowers and feeling something I could not immediately categorize. The rest were smaller. A chip in the paint above the bathroom door that is not there in this apartment. My toothbrush, which is red at home and in this apartment is the same toothbrush in blue. The exact position of my notebooks stacked on the kotatsu, shifted two centimeters to the left of where I had placed them. A smell in the genkan, something faintly coastal that is not in my apartment, as though the sea comes in slightly more here, or the building is oriented differently enough that the wind pattern changes. The crack in the ceiling, which I had confirmed was in the right place before I understood what right place meant, and which on closer inspection runs two centimeters longer here, reaching further toward the window than I remembered. Seventeen things. Some large, so