Marie Anne Arreola

THREADS: A firmware patch for the selves we misplace in time

PUBLISHED IN FOLIO 2026: VOL. 41.

I used to think nostalgia was a kind of laziness, a soft eraser dragging across what actually happened. But lately it feels closer to practice; an apprenticeship in paying attention to the ruins we inherit and the ones we build without meaning to. Maybe it’s the museum exhibit I haven’t yet visited but keep imagining, the one titled Genealogy of Nostalgia, that has me reconsidering how memory works. I don’t trust nostalgia’s promises, but I trust its persistence: how a memory, cracked and inconvenient, keeps resurfacing like a coin you’re compelled to flip even though the outcome is already inscribed in its metal.

Maybe that’s why I’ve started noticing small things again: the way light skitters across the pond behind my building even on grey days, as if auditioning for the role of meaning, or at least for the gentler task of reminder. I’m not sure I still believe in meaning, not in the tidy museum-plaque sense, but the glimmer seems stubborn about believing in me. It feels like the kind of detail a future curator would cite as evidence: Here, in the ordinary light, the first signs of return.

In the recurring dream, I snap my fingers off like Kit-Kats. The sound echoes like gunfire, or like the quick, sharp crack my father’s neck makes before he cries—an accidental overture to sorrow I learned long before I had the vocabulary for it. Around me, miracles glitch. The priest posted the homily late again; twelve parishioners ascended before the update installed. Their names autocorrect into holy error on my phone, thin and luminous, like annotations from a future theology student studying the early myths of our era.

I scroll through the endless terms & conditions, clauses about salvation hidden in the fine print no one reads. Apparently we agreed to be reborn as myths.

No wonder our edges glow through the glitches.

My dad’s Blockbuster card still scans. He swipes it like a badge, each aisle a territory he once patrolled. “Justice isn’t rented,” he likes to say. “Only returned.” I deleted God from my contacts—He left me on read after I asked how my mother’s bones turned to rebar. Classic. If you’re hearing this, you’re one of the few. The sky birthed another moon tonight; it hums like a warning. I’m tired of miracles.
END THREAD. Archived under collapsing cloud. Retweet if you remember fireflies.

Driving home, the white line on the highway flashes like a zipper I could tug open to reveal something small and trembling inside me. But it’s only a road. Only paint telling us where not to drift. I’ve always mistaken boundaries for portals, as if every limit carried a secret hinge. Maybe that’s another early sign, the world offering a dozen possible meanings and asking me to practice choosing one without flinching.

The Megabus ahead coughs black exhaust—nothing like the double-decker ship I once romanticized, ferrying students southward into new versions of themselves. Just a tired vessel full of tired bodies. I joke that it softens the disappointment, though really the joke only outlines it. People say there are no owls in Bushwick. Yet some nights I swear I hear hooting, unless it’s the doves of a hundred bad mornings, shaking the dark like a blanket snapped clean. I pull into the station lot and feel a strange, unearned relief. No blood this time, even after all that thinking. But then the harder question surfaces, slow and inevitable: Who’s coming to get me? Night arrives in its place.
Red light. Stop. Green light. Go.
Red, green—no blue lights, only distant blue stars.
Tonight the sky feels unusually heavy, as if bending low to eavesdrop, the way a mountain might lean toward a traveler who hasn’t yet realized the mountain is only a lens.

There was once a traveler who drove the night highways of Culver City, following the pale white lines that unspooled beneath him like ribs in the long body of time. As a child he’d been told each line marked the border between possible selves; cross too many and you might misplace the one you intended to become. He carried that superstition like a museum docent’s warning: Please do not touch the glass; the artifact may fracture along its futures.

One night he reached the cursed left-turn arrow beside the In-N-Out, the one that blinked red with the smug authority of small tyrants. Miss it and you were doomed to orbit the intersection twice, as though the city demanded every wanderer rehearse his errors before earning permission to change course.

So he sighed, turned in, and entered the fluorescent chapel of burgers and impatience. The air smelled of fries and fresh starts. The line advanced with the slow, stubborn faith of people unsure what they want but unwilling to abandon wanting. And there, just ahead, stood a boy uncannily familiar—same posture, same unruly hair, the same way of clutching hope like a warm coin he feared might cool.

“Hey,” the traveler said, “don’t I know you?”
The boy didn’t fully turn, only sent back a smile that trembled at its edges.
“No,” he said. “I’m his brother.”
A lie, but a tender one—no heavier than a slit in the fabric of time.

They crept forward.

Outside, the highway lines hummed in their lanes, taking quiet attendance.
“Why are you here?” the traveler asked.
“To see what becomes of me,” the boy said. “I follow the lines. Whenever they split, I take the thinner one. The one that wobbles. The one most likely to sting if I guess wrong.”
The traveler nodded. “I remember doing that.”

A bus drifted past the window, its lights smeared on the glass, carrying two exhausted passengers—souls paused between destinations, too tired to improve their stories.

Los Angeles at midnight felt like a city where time slept curled on a warm windowsill, dreaming but refusing to move.

“Tonight matters,” the traveler murmured. “I didn’t know it then, but I know it now. Turn left a second too late, stay home, ignore the quiver of impulse—she dissolves back into the multitudes of strangers.”
The boy blinked. “Who is she?”
“Someone arriving from another branch of the road,” the traveler said. “Someone you meet in this line. Someone you pretend to know before you actually do.”

They reached the counter. The neon glow cast the same borrowed color across both faces.
“We don’t even like fast food,” the boy said.
“No,” the traveler answered. “But in this place the vegetables look honestly like vegetables. Maybe chance nests in places where everything is performing the thing it almost becomes.”

The boy studied him as if parsing a reflection in a lake, looking for the slight tremor that proves the water is real.
“If I step forward,” he said, “do you disappear?”
The traveler exhaled. “Not me. Only the version that backed away. The one who stayed home. The one who let the arrow win.”

He stepped. Small, deliberate. Almost shy. And something shifted. The traveler felt it not as drama but as physics: the faint tightening of the world’s seams, the hush that follows a bird’s lift from a branch, the moment before a museum’s motion sensors wake. Then the loosening—quiet, clean, like a knot releasing under warm water. Outside, the highway lines clarified. What had been a scatter of possibilities gathered into a single, continuous line of white paint leading outward, unbroken.

He understood then that this small advance mattered. The joke with its hidden hinge, the impulse that tugged him out into the neon glare, the hunger that had nothing to do with food: each had been a single thread, and together they’d held the night open. Pull any one loose and the moment would slacken, collapse into itself. The scene would flatten into weather, a sky with no tent beneath it, a narrative with nothing to turn on.

But the arrow flicked green. And the road, patient as breath, leaned forward.

Later, in a museum, I finally linger before the wall titled Genealogy of Nostalgia. A line claims that memories of bygone days help us understand ourselves, sharpen empathy, sustain a fragile notion of future. I read it twice, suspicious of any optimism that doesn’t acknowledge the labor required to hold it. Yet something quiet in me nods. Maybe I’ve been preparing for this recognition all along, tracing thin lines, stepping toward faint arrows, confusing boundaries for portals until the world decided to bend.

Effort isn’t everything, but without it, joy loses its grip. I used to think hope was naïve, but now it feels more like carpentry—measured, deliberate, requiring callouses. The world trains us toward ease, toward shortcuts, toward the seductive logic of convenience. But ease is a solvent; it erases imagination. Hope, though—hope asks us to stay.

Naming the futures we were promised and never quite reached doesn’t make me sentimental. Remembering the earlier versions of myself who trusted those promises doesn’t either. It only drifts into nostalgia when forgetting feels easier than staying awake to what’s still possible. Some days the mountain demands a direct stare. Other days you circle it, gathering view after view, until it becomes clear the thing you were scrutinizing wasn’t the mountain at all but the stubborn lens you kept dragging with you. And then there are moments when time folds in on itself—past brushing against future, present holding the crease, like a paper crane that shouldn’t balance but somehow does.

In those moments, the map goes quiet. What matters is the small thing already in your hand—the flower you almost overlooked, the one still capable of pretending it’s a beginning.

🙢🙗🙠

Marie Anne Arreola is a bilingual poet and editor whose work lives at the intersection of speculative lyric, digital culture, and diaspora memory. She is a 2025 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, author of Sparks of the Liberating Spirit Who Trapped Us (Foreshore Publishing, UK), winner of the Plumas en Ciernes Short Story Prize, and founding editor of VOCES, a bilingual platform for global artists and writers. Her work appears in over forty literary journals across the United States, Europe, and Latin America. She is a two-time finalist for the Francisco Ruiz Udiel Latin American Poetry Prize (V and VI editions) from Valparaíso Ediciones and a recipient of the 2024 Young Poets Scholarship awarded by the Gutiérrez Lozano Foundation.