Section One: Help! I’m In Love With a Ghost
This section of the handbook will deal primarily with time loops, but it is applicable to all manner of temporal corrections, mistakes, and distortions.
It’s a brilliant day in August, the sun is shining, your soulmate is lounging on a picnic blanket nearby, and you’re happier than you’ve been in a long time. But as you approach your lover, you suddenly remember. It’s a loop. You’ve been reliving this exact day for a long, long time. The escape to the loop is yet out of reach, and while you plot your solution you fall in love with a local in this temporal small town. It’s obvious that you shouldn’t be hurt every morning when they don’t remember you, it shouldn’t sting when you greet them with all the warmth in your heart and you’re met with polite neutrality at best. But it does.
The person you know, or knew, is a Ghost. The version of them that laughed with you just yesterday is now lost to the infinite forgetting of time. You may approach them now, try to win their favor again, but the most important thing to remember with Ghost feelings is that the current version of them owes you nothing. They may look upon you today and due to some infinitely complex neural interaction (or simply because you’re in a strange mood) they may want nothing to do with you. Their experience is valid because after all, they don’t know you! Just because they fell in love with you once, doesn’t mean it may happen in the next loop.
Dealing with the sudden loss of your slowly built feelings can be devastating. While it’s easier said than done, it’s vital to invest your energy in those who exist on the same path as you. That person may be your perfect match but they are trapped in a palace you cannot enter. You may only visit, pace the grounds, and beg the guards to let you live there. But time is unforgiving, the person in that loop will never remember, and you must resolve yourself and carry on.
Stages of getting over the loss
Allow yourself to feel your feelings
Cut off communication with your Ghost, do not dwell on the fact that this is easier for them than you
Find a support system, preferably one with a time machine or a quantum tunneler
