The Time Traveller

It was in the year 2009 that I made my greatest discovery ever.  A series of circular thought experiments led me to it. 

It began as I drunkenly explained to my best friend Ivan that I do in fact have my very own space travel machine.  It was an old joke and not a particularly good one.  As we sat on his back lawn drinking home brewed beer my equally inebriated friend was laughing at me and waiting for the punch line.

I didn’t get so far as to explain that the machine I was referring to was my two door Honda Civic parked out on the front lawn. In fact I somehow became unable to communicate.  As I drifted into a star spun stupor I experienced a moment of perfect clarity.

This was my eureka moment, my epiphany.  In a flash of inspiration I suddenly knew the truth that space and time are inseparably linked.  I realized that I am a perfect example of a body travelling in both space and time.  I move in the three dimensions of space relatively freely in whichever direction I chose, yet for some reason I move in the fourth dimension of time in a stable forward linear direction.

In my heightened state I began to postulate that all it would take would be a shift in consciousness, such as the one I was experiencing to be able to move more freely along the axis of time.

The next morning as I woke on the lawn I found that someone had covered me with blankets in the middle of the night.  It was a beautiful summer morning and I felt energized.  I couldn’t wait for my fellow partygoers to awake from their respective stupors so that I could share my moment of epiphany.

As the hours of the morning went by with barely a stir from the comatose bodies around me, I realized that none of them would be in any state to hear my life changing theories.  I decided to make my way home.  I lived just around the corner and the Civic took me there with little effort on my part.

At home I stretched out on the couch and allowed my mind to continue to wander.  As my theory crystallized itself further, I could feel myself continuing to move forward in a linear motion through time.  But then as my mind began to shift I found my perceptions slowing down.  A fly buzzing across the room slowed to a point where it finally stopped in mid air.  Everything in the room stopped moving, the fly, the breeze on the curtains, the air, my breath.  When I realized that my heart had stopped beating I became a little freaked out and I willed time to return to its normal pace. 

My curiosity had been piqued now however, I realized that in the same way that I could control my own movement in space, so too I was becoming aware of an ability to move in time.

I took a few deep breaths and made another attempt.  This time however, perhaps out of nervousness I slowed time at a much greater rate.  I got to the same point where everything had stopped for an instant, but this time I just kept on going.  There was a sort of Doppler effect, which was not entirely pleasant, but it soon passed as time began to move backwards. 

I saw myself getting up out of the couch and walking in reverse out the door, fumbling with my keys, back stepping to the car and reversing all the way back to the party. 

I relived the morning through my eyes waiting for everyone to get up, I lay back down on the comfortable lawn.  I listened to myself sleep, which could have been an interesting pastime in itself, but to pass time faster, I sped up the backward movement of time to a greater speed. 

There was a flash of colour as my bedding was whisked away from me.  I saw an intense flash across my face as the moment of my epiphany passed by and then darkness.  My friend and I seemed comical as we discussed the deeper mysteries of life, while sloshing dark ale from our mouths into large beer glasses.

I slowed the backward movement of time so that I could watch again the events of the party.  I had forgotten how my conversation had begun.  He seemed to be consoling me somehow.  I was very red in the face and wet like I had just washed my face.  We walked backwards through the back door of the house and there as we stood in the kitchen with a group of horrified onlookers I sucked a large pool of vomit off the floor and into my wide opened mouth.

The embarrassment of the night came flooding back to me as I relived the moment that the heavy wave of nausea overtook my body. 

I looked around the room, but then I saw her again and for a moment I forgot my shame.

There before me stood an angel, a vision of beauty.  I was showing off to her.  I was trying to be noticed, I was trying too hard.  I was playing up to the crowd I was playing up for her.  I was dominating the conversation, I was playing the fool. 

She took my hand tenderly and I slowed time again to relive the moment that we were introduced, then she walked backward out of the room and out of my life forever.

I stopped everything and there I stood in the kitchen with a group of frozen friends and no heart beat.  I was alone and had too much to drink.  As time drew to a halt, so too my feelings of shame returned.  Nothing lies in the past for me now.  I have been there before, it is empty.

I heard my heart begin to beat again and she walked forward into the room.  She wore a long flowing white lace patterned summer dress, that held on to her shapely figure, accentuating all the right curves.  Her soft eyes met mine and she smiled.  Her golden hair seemed to float in a breeze, although there was nothing but hot air and revelers there in the kitchen. 

My heart stopped once more but this time it was within the natural linear movement of time. 
“My name is Cindy,” she whispered in my ear.
“I’m John,” I replied calmly.

It was our moment, but I knew what was coming up and I wasn’t prepared to go through that shame a third time, so I skipped ahead, through our brief conversation and past my artificially fuelled confidence.  I sped time so fast that there was a blur until I knew it was safe to look again.

I slowed the pace once more and relived my conversation with Ivan until I saw myself pass out with a silly drunken grin on my face.  There was indeed a flash of light that lit up the entire backyard.  It may or may not have triggered my epiphany, but it emanated from a spotlight above the back door.

As if from above I watched as a figure carrying blankets emerged, backlit with the glow of the light.  It was too bright to see clearly, but I recognized the angelic glow of her long white summer dress and the full curves of her feminine figure.  It was Cindy.  She placed the pile of blankets on a table near the back door, but then unfurled the topmost one in one swift movement.  There was a flash of colour and then the blanket enveloped me.  She stood and looked down at me.  Not with pity, nor with disgust, but with true concern.  I lay awake in my sleeping body and felt the contentment that I wish I had known at the time.

Now here were possibilities opening ahead of me.  I raced forward in time, through sleep, through the sunrise, through the morning of waiting and the short drive home, back to the couch.  I had no intention of stopping, I braced myself once again for the Doppler effect and passed through the moment at great speed.

This time however was different and much more disturbing.  The void that I found myself surrounded by was almost indescribable.  Not blackness, but something much darker.  Not an infinite expanse of endless space, but no space at all. 

I drew myself to a halt, somehow.  When I realized what had happened I listened for my heartbeat, but there was no sound, I looked down to the place that my body normally existed, and that too was not there.  I became afraid, because although I felt that I had already begun to retreat from this place I had no point of reference anymore to tell me what direction I was moving.

With a deep gasp of air I returned to my body and noticed my mobile phone vibrating on the coffee table in front of me. 

It was Ivan, I answered it.
“Hey bud, where did you disappear to this morning, people are asking after you.”
“Yeah, I’m okay, just came home for some rest.”
“Well come back man, we need someone to go on a breakfast run.”


I stepped out the front door and unlocked my space travel machine. 

There is no reason why we humans cannot travel backwards and forwards in time as freely as they are able to move through the dimensions of space.  It is a wise choice however, that we make to live here in the present and move only in a stable linear direction.  In the past lie only memories, nothing else is there.  The future holds not even these, and nothing else has yet arrived.