I peaked in the box and saw a man and blinked. When I opened my eyes, he looked better, more energetic. Another moment he looked even younger.

---

Mark didn’t notice at first. He just felt… better. The low, persistent ache in his knee from an old college football injury was gone.

On the third day, he caught his reflection while brushing his teeth and stopped. The faint lines around his eyes had softened. He looked younger. He wrote it off as good sleep.

On the fourth day, he found a gray hair on his pillow. Then another. He plucked them, a superstitious dread coiling in his gut. He wasn't going gray. He was losing it.

He checked his driver’s license. The man in the picture, taken six months ago, looked tired. He was thirty-seven. But when he looked in the mirror, he knew, with a certainty that chilled him, that he was thirty-three.

The next morning, he was thirty-two.

From then on, it was a countdown. Each day, he woke knowing exactly how old he was. The number came instantly, a terrible instinct. On the sixth day, he started a notepad beside the bed.

• Day 6: Thirty-one. The ache in his back vanished.
• Day 7: Thirty. His favorite jacket fit the way it had in college.
• Day 8: Twenty-nine. His beard grew patchier, softer.
• Day 9: Twenty-eight. Coworkers joked about his “glow-up.”
• Day 10: Twenty-seven. He laughed, but his laugh sounded wrong, too young.

On Day 11, when he was twenty-six, someone finally asked.

A coworker caught him staring at his reflection. “You okay, man?”

“Yeah... Just... thinking.”

The man chuckled. “How old are you again?”

Mark answered without hesitation. “Twenty-six.”

The silence was instant and heavy.

The coworker frowned. “You mean thirty-something, right?”

Mark froze. He knew he was twenty-six. The certainty pulsed in his chest. But the math screamed something else.

“No,” he whispered. “I’m thirty-seven.”

He tried to stay awake after that. Coffee, energy drinks, loud music. But the debt of sleep is one the body always collects. He would jolt awake and know he had fallen further back.

Twenty-two.

His wife, Sarah, whispered one morning, her voice trembling as she touched his impossibly smooth cheek. “Mark... you look like you did the day we met.”

The memories started to slip next. His wedding day felt like an old video. The memory of holding his newborn daughter was there, but the emotion was gone, replaced by a nervous kid’s fear.

Nineteen.

He stared at Sarah, seeing an older woman he recognized but no longer remembered how to love.

The last entry in his journal is scrawled in uneven, youthful handwriting:

“I know I’m getting younger. I don’t want to sleep. Every time I wake up, I forget more. I’m nineteen today. I don’t want to go back. I can't go to sleep again.”

The final report notes that a woman named Sarah brought her husband, Mark, to the emergency room. He was non-verbal, curled in a fetal position, staring with the wide, uncomprehending eyes of a toddler at a world he was no longer old enough to understand.

The nurse in charge gave him a sedative so he could sleep.

---

I close the box and lay my hand on the lid, wondering if Mark would wake up again.

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