Your Unfinished Future

The museum has finished with you for tonight.

You leave here carrying a day that was never yours to keep, quietly owing more than you agreed to spend, and amended in a record you were never shown. You also go out known by something that cannot quite place your name, answered by a life you decided not to live, and with a line still open behind you. And you walk on with more room around you than the corridor promised and unlisted by every forecast above you.

The Civic Time Expansion Era expects you back. It is still holding a day with your name on it and no year to put it in.

The Counterfactual Communications Boom keeps your line open. Somewhere a receiver is warm, and nobody in that kitchen has hung up.

The Domestic Weather Memory Era files your future under shelter. Expect rain indoors, and a voice calling you in before the thunder.

The lights go down one room at a time, in the order you walked them.