Dawn Aleira used to keep journals, thick ones with weathered covers and pages crammed with timelines. Not stories. Not dreams. Timelines.
In these books, Dawn wrote not what had happened, but what would. She tracked her life forward like a scientist maps a chemical reaction. A page for her wedding. A page for her first apartment. A sketch of the child she might one day have. A budget for a business she hadn't founded yet. Everything was imagined in exacting detail, including the dates: October 17, 2044—move to Berlin; March 12, 2051—first gray hair.
She did not imagine out of hope. She imagined it out of terror.
Her Spectrum title, the one etched across her life profile in a clean, sterile font, was: Likely to Regret the Future." She received it just after her fifteenth birthday, when she had spent an entire weekend crying over a missed scholarship application.
"It's not that serious," her father had told her.
"You don't understand," she had whispered, her voice brittle as glass. "I'm already ruining everything."
Dawn's world was one of caution tape and corner-cutting. She never jaywalked. She never drank soda. She skipped birthday parties to practice for tests that weren't coming. Her room was painted grey and white to avoid overstimulation. Her wardrobe was a muted calendar of months: linen in spring, navy in fall. She treated joy like sugar—small, controlled doses only.
Other students called her a perfectionist.
Her teachers called her a visionary.
But the truth was, Dawn didn't know how to stop spiralling. For every decision she made, she wrote five backup plans. If she made a new friend, she would quietly note the day she expected them to drift away. When someone complimented her, she mentally dissected what they meant.
She lived ten seconds ahead of the present and was miserable for it.
The school tried to help. They assigned her a Spectrum Counsellor named Ms. Elira (no relation), who told her to "reclaim the moment."
"Try mindfulness," Ms. Elira said.
"Try breathing."
"Try art."
Dawn tried.
She drew clocks with cracked faces. Trees growing backwards. She started writing obituaries for her future selves: the Dawn who had become a chef and burned out; the Dawn who traveled to India and never came back. Her art show, held in the school gym, was called Post-Mortems of the Possible Me.
The crowd didn't know how to react. Her mother cried. Her classmates stared. The local Spectrum ambassador featured it in a city blog, calling it "an arresting study of identity anxiety."
The post got 40,000 likes.
Dawn locked herself in her room for a week.
Her most vivid memory wasn't from childhood but from a night just six months ago: a blackout on the subway. She'd been on her way home from a volunteer seminar, sitting alone, rehearsing tomorrow's decisions.
Then the lights cut out. The world went still.
For five full minutes, she couldn't plan.
And in those five minutes, something fractured. Not a breakdown. A release.
No lights. No certainty. Just breathe and breathe and breathe.
She didn't remember what she thought about. Only that it felt real.
That was the moment she realized her whole life was a retreat from a war that hadn't started.
The people around her noticed the change. Slowly, Dawn began to shift. She stopped correcting her friends' grammar. She bought a red hoodie. She took a nap during study hour.
At first, it felt like cheating.
But after a while, it felt like living.
Her monologues in the debate club became looser and funnier. Her voice cracked once, and she laughed instead of apologising. She started talking about dreams that weren't timelines.
"I want to live in a city with a rooftop garden," she said once. "Where I can hear the trains but never have to ride them."
Her teammates stared. Then clapped.
She smiled.
That day, someone drew a graffiti tag on her locker: "Live Now, Dawn."
She didn't erase it.
There was still fear. Still, the old engine of anxiety was roaring beneath her ribs. She didn't try to kill it. She just learned how to hold it without letting it steer.
On her seventeenth birthday, she burned her journals.
Every future. Every prediction. Every meticulous, aching entry.
She watched them curl and blacken in her backyard fire pit, and when her mom asked what she was doing, she said simply:
"I'm trying to stop killing all the versions of me I haven't met yet."
Her mom nodded. Said nothing. Just sat beside her until the flames died.
The next day, Dawn signed up for a creative writing class.
She wrote fiction. Not futures. Not forecasts. Just possibilities.
Her first story was about a girl who learned to swim by drowning a little every day.
Her teacher asked if it was autobiographical.
"Aren't they all?" she replied.
One month later, an updated Spectrum notification flashed on her device.
[UPDATE: Subject shows signs of deviation from predicted outcome. Future regret index: RECALIBRATING.]
For the first time, Dawn didn't check the full report.
She just smiled.
And for a moment, she didn't look forward at all.