Taken with Instagram
The Rules Of Time Travel
This is not a work of fiction.
#1 A Time Traveler is always in the present moment. The present moment is all you really have.
When most people think of time travel, I’ve learned, they picture a crazy scientist with his machine turning knobs and pushing buttons to select the year, month, day, hour, minute, even the exact second he would like to travel to. They might imagine him jumping into the future to grab the upcoming lottery numbers and popping back into the present to make himself rich. Or they might conjure an image of the scientist laboring to return to the past and save his wife from a fatal car crash. They’ll smile as they tell you how he jumps back to the present and finds his wife happily sleeping in their bed slipping between the sheets himself and holding her as tight as he can. Their eye’s wander out into space fantasizing about how great it would be to have such a machine. That’s because most people don’t understand how time travel really works. If they did - if they knew how easy it is to slide out of one moment and fall into a different one - that look of wonder in their eyes would be a look of fear. They would know it only takes something as small as the blink of an eye for everything they have ever known to be lost forever. A blink of an eye was all it took.
—-
The screaming stopped.
Then it started again. I opened my eyes and was startled as the bright yellow sun rushed in. That wasn’t there a second ago, I thought. I looked down, more yellow, sand. Neither was that..
My eyes began adjusting to the light. I was surrounded by people. A woman to my left was screaming, pointing at me with horror on her face. She had green eyes, bleach-white teeth, and really strong lungs. Everyone was standing around me gaping but keeping a healthy distance like they thought I might infect them if they got to close. It’s okay, I thought, I’m not sick. But something was not right; The sun, the sand. I wasn’t here a moment ago, but where was I?
“Sir, I need you to put that down slowly and turn around with your hands above your head,” a voice, shaky, coming from behind me.
I jumped up and spun around quickly, too quickly. The cop had his gun pointed at my chest, “Sir, drop the knife and put your hands on your head now!”
Knife? My right hand opened and I felt the knife fall, tip landing in the sand. Right, that knife. It was starting to come back to me now; Time travel is always like this, like trying to remember a dream after you wake up, everything is a little…fuzzy. But I was remembering. The restaurant. The chefs knife dangling on the edge of the table. The old lady who tried to grab the table as she fell. How she managed to grab the tablecloth instead. And the blood. I looked down at myself, the blood, I was covered in it.
Slowly, carefully now, I raised my hands above my head. The cop sized me up for a moment and then slowly, also carefully, holstered his gun trading it for a pair of silver handcuffs which he locked around my wrists.
I could tell already this was not going to be my week.
