He wakes up, slightly hung over despite not remembering drinking the night before - or, in fact, anything from the last three days.

He knows what this lost time means.

He gets out of bed wearing the same lacy pink nightgown he’s woken up in every time this happens. He assumes that she does this to emasculate him. (In reality, she does this because it’s very funny.)

He checks his phone, both to verify the time and to see what new photos and videos have appeared since the last time he looked at it. There are more photos this time - she’s wearing a tight short blue dress and dancing at a club he doesn’t recognize. She’s doing shots with a woman he knows from work. She’s kissing a man he knows from college. She’s… not just kissing him in this photo.

There’s one video. In it, she tells him that she knows who he knows, and she plans to take advantage of that. She winks at the camera before ending the video, but not before he recognizes his ex-boyfriend, naked, on the bed.

He rubs his face and thinks to himself how lucky he is that ever since she showed up a year ago and he started losing three nights each month to her, all she seems to do is go dancing, drink, and have sex.

He’s wrong, of course. Not about when he started losing time, but about when she arrived. She didn’t just show up a year ago. She’s always been here, losing all her time to him. That’s how she knows what he’s been doing and thinking since he woke up in a nightgown this morning.

And while he thinks I’m spending all the time I’ve reclaimed from him on hedonistic pursuits, he never stops to look at the timestamps, or think about what I’m doing when the clubs aren’t open. If he did, he’d know that none of the pictures are from his lost daylight hours, and he might consider that I’m spending that time working on a way to reclaim all my time from him.