Past Time (part 1)

This is like the 27th time I’ve tried to write this all down. I used to open every time with “I’m not crazy,” but after saying it so many times it started to lose its meaning. And anyway, saying “I’m not crazy,” isn’t the best way to convince people that you’re not crazy, if you know what I mean. But there’s also the fact that maybe, just maybe, I am crazy. Maybe a little bit, maybe a lot. I don’t know. I mean, do crazy people know they’re crazy? Or does knowing that you’re crazy actually indicate enough self-awareness to invalidate the craziness?

But I don’t think I’m crazy. My doctors obviously don’t share that opinion, or else I wouldn’t be here in the hospital, doing therapy writing and taking anti-psychotic drugs like they’re candy. It’s kinda funny; people used to tell me I had a drug problem, but the drugs I used to do are nothing compared to what they’ve got me on now. Half the time I’m not sure if I’m awake or not, but I guess it’s better than electroshock therapy. And the drugs do help me maintain control of where my mind goes, which is probably for the best.

But anyhow, my doctors seem to think it’ll help if I write everything down, and they’re right, but not for the reasons they think. See, writing it all down helps because then I can sorta tell what really happened the first time around and what got changed. I didn’t mean to change anything, at first, but I didn’t know what I was doing, and when you can timeskip like I can, that’s a recipe for disaster.

Did I forget to mention that part? Timeskipping? Before The Event, nobody would have believed that someone could project their consciousness down and back up the timestream, re-entering it at various points and re-living and even altering past events. But The Event changed all that. I guess when a bunch of people suddenly start flying and throwing buildings and transforming into ice, timeskipping’s not that unbelievable after all. Real life superheroes and supervillains erupting into their powers all at once, with live news coverage, changed pretty much everything about what people will believe. But still, nobody really believes me anyway. I mean, if you can skip through the timestream and alter history by stopping bad things before they happen, how would anyone know? If I went back in time and killed Hitler before his rise to power, nobody would remember Hitler, and all my claims of heroism would simply make me look crazy…er.

I can’t go back and kill Hitler, just so you know. My timeskipping seems limited to my own timeline, so I can’t go back any further than my own birth. Which is something you should really try to avoid re-living, if at all possible. It’s a messy, chaotic event, and my baby self’s brain wasn’t developed enough to control my timeskipping, so I had to live out 4 years in real time before I could jump back out. I’ve tried to block most of that out; I mean, breastfeeding alone presents far too many fucked up issues for any sane person to want to remember it. Mostly all I can remember is that potty training is really fucking hard.

See? This is the sort of thing that makes the doctors think I’m crazy. But they want me to write down what happened, and in order to make sense of everything, you have to understand where (and when) I’m coming from. And what’s the point of writing down something fake just to please the doctors? It’s not like I’m getting out of here anytime soon, so I might as well try and keep things truthful, or as truthful as they can be when every time I remember something, there’s a chance I’ll skip there and change it…

That’s the main problem. I said that if I change history to prevent something bad happening (and I have, two or three times), no one will remember. Which is true, mostly. Except for me. I remember. I remember everything. I remember how it happened the first time, and the second time, and every fucking time after that, and let me tell you, it’s really fucking hard to keep things straight when you’ve got multiple parallel memories of the same time period fighting for dominance in your head. It’s also really fucking hard to put things back the way they were once you start screwing around with history. And some things are really hard to change. Sure, you could kill Hitler as a baby and stop him from rampaging through Europe and committing mass torture and genocide, but who’s to say someone else won’t step in to fill the gap, or something worse will happen as a result of changing a major event from World War II? And little things are sometimes even harder to change. Like stopping your girlfriend from dumping you…

That’s my dark secret. My whole timeline is my playground, and instead of trying to stop something like 9/11 from happening, I try to get my girlfriend to stick around a little bit longer. But how do you do that, exactly? How do you stop someone from growing distant and cold to you? How do you stop your girlfriend from leaving when you don’t really know when or why they stopped loving you in the first place?

Julie. Short blonde hair, lopsided smile, and green eyes that seemed bottomless. I met her at a fall dance on September 12, 2005. That detail is still the same. Sure, I went back to before we met a few times, to see what she was like, but that just made me feel like a creepy stalker, so I stopped. And I was scared that if I met her before I actually met her, I’d screw up the whole relationship, and lose the few years we had together.

But anyhow, the dance. She was wearing a clingy dress with black and grey stripes, and as soon as I saw her I couldn’t look away. She laughed so easily and freely, not like most girls, who seem so worried about what people will think of them that they restrain themselves to short giggles. I watched her dance a few times, working up my nerve, and when the twangy opening notes of Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out” ripped across the dance floor, I made my move. She smiled and said “Yeah, sure,” when I asked her to dance, and the rest was literally history.

Franz Ferdinand led to Destiny’s Child, and we moved in close. I didn’t even have to ask her if she wanted to dance this time; it seemed natural and right that we continue what we’d started. Our bodies pressed close, my arms around her waist, and midway through the song she started playing with my hair. From that point on I was hers.

We danced through U2 and Dido, the Killers and Maroon 5, and never once did we consider separating or dancing with others. She put her head on my shoulder for the slow songs and pressed her body to mine, and we ground our hips and gyrated on the fast songs, and the rest of world might as well have ceased to exist.

As many times as I’ve gone back to this time, this memory, I’ve never managed to screw it up. Of course, there’s really nothing I want to change about it. It all happened exactly like it should. It’s really the only perfect moment in my timeline, apparently, as it’s always magical, always wonderful, and always ends with us walking back to the dorms holding hands and joking about the decorations at the dance. One month later we were going steady, and again, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

Six years later she left me, and my world fell apart. And surely somewhere in that timespan there’s something, some little detail, some clue, something I can change to keep that breakup from ever happening. I just have to find it without screwing things up even worse than I already have in the process…

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe I should start back at the beginning, right? Get it? Back to the beginning pretty much describes my life. It’s like a joke without a punchline. You’d think that being able to go back and do things over infinitely would guarantee a perfect life. But you’d be wrong.

Pretty much everyone agrees that The Event was one of those top 10 historical moments, maybe even the number 1 historical moment. Like 9/11, or Kennedy’s assassination, everyone has a story about where they were or what they were doing when it happened. I mean, it forced us to alter our understanding of what it means to be human, and the turmoil and fallout from it are still being dealt with. So yeah, where was I when The Event happened? Passed out in my recliner, stoned and zoned out on pills.

It was about 6 months after Julie left, and I was still taking it pretty hard. I’ve always been a bit of a stoner, but I really upped my weed intake after she left. Started taking pills too, supposedly for anxiety, but mainly just to numb myself so I didn’t have to think about life without her. I couldn’t afford to move to a new place, so I sat there in the apartment we’d shared and did my best to kill the ghosts of happier times that haunted the place.

Everything reminded me of her. “The bed’s too big without you,” is what Sting and the Police said, and they were so right. I started sleeping on the couch so I wouldn’t have to roll over to no one every time I woke up. The kitchen brought back memories of cooking together. The extra space on the book and cd shelves taunted me with the absence of not just her, but her things as well. I couldn’t even watch the same TV shows we’d watched together, not without losing it. She was gone, but her presence could be felt everywhere, even in her absence. I began to dread coming home, and when I got there, I did my best to get fucked up as fast as possible and lose myself in TV or video games.

Life became the grey in between periods of sleep.

So it’s not really too surprising that when the biggest event in the course of human history took place, I was too fucked up to notice. I’d smoked a bunch of hydro and taken enough xanax to put me out pretty hard. In retrospect I think I might have been trying to kill myself, without making a real effort at it. I mean, I didn’t want to kill myself, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to live either.

So there I was, passed out in the recliner, while approximately 3% of the population of the planet developed some kind of paranormal ability. Lots of people could suddenly fly, or shoot lasers from their eyes, or even transform into animals. It was crazy, and there was a lot of death and destruction, as apparently superpowers don’t come with an automatic understanding of how they work and how to turn them off. People were dying, in pain and fear, while I dreamed. For two days.

In my dreams I drifted through my life like a ghost, fog clouding the edges of my vision, clearing up at various intervals as I drifted in closer. Most times I simply watched myself from above, but every now and then I felt a tug and with an almost audible snap, I dropped into my own body.

At first I thought I was simply seeing past events from behind my own eyes, but things didn’t always happen the way I remembered them. Like when my mom left my dad, when I was 12. I remember hiding in my room as they fought, and then watching from my window as she drove away crying. But this time I didn’t. I staggered, dreamlike, out of my room, down the hall, and into my parents’ bedroom. They were too busy shouting at each other to notice me, until I broke my silence, my voice breaking as I yelled at my mom.

“Why do you hate us? Don’t you know we love you?”

They both turned and stared at me, shock twisting their faces into almost funny grimaces. My father recovered first, his hands stretching out to me as he tried to reassure me.

“It’s ok, Mark. It’s ok. Mama and Daddy are just upset with each other. But you know we both love you, right?”

I could see the agony behind his eyes as he said it. He knew she was leaving, and he knew there was nothing he could do to stop her, but he still had to comfort me.

“No! That’s not true! If she loved me, she wouldn’t have left and abandoned me! If she loved me, she’d have called or sent me a letter every now and then, instead of just disappearing like she forgot about me!”

They both stared at me oddly. Part of me knew I was talking about things that hadn’t happened yet, but the words were all twisty in my mouth. After she left I’d stayed with Dad, and I could count on both hands the number of times she visited me after that. I’d never had a chance to tell her how much that hurt, and now here in my fucked up dream was that chance, and I couldn’t pass it up. The pain and anger poured out of me like pus from an infected blister, and I wouldn’t have known how to stop it, even if I wanted to.

“You left me! You left him! And you never seemed to care how much that hurt! I hate you! I hope you die!!! Fuck you! Fuck off and die, you bitch!!!”

I was screaming now, tears streaming down my face. I didn’t even know what I was saying, or who I was screaming at anymore. Dad just stood there, dumbfounded, but Mom’s face was grey, her hands covering her mouth. Dad finally shook off his paralysis and gathered me into a hug, while Mom stumbled out of the room. She left us like that, Dad holding me while I cried, and then I snapped back out of my body.

Still shaken and disturbed, I continued to drift through my life. Snap. Middle school, where I decided this time not to try out for football. Snap. High school, where I started smoking weed a lot earlier this time, and ended up getting busted for weed a lot earlier as well. Snap. College, and meeting Julie. Snap. Dropping out without finishing. I knew I was getting close to the point where Julie left, and I knew I didn’t want to re-live that, and suddenly things were happening in reverse. Back to high school, then middle school, and Mom leaving again. Maybe it was cuz I was still raw from my dream venting, but this time I managed not to snap back into my body. I couldn’t handle that sort of thing again so soon.

This continued for what seemed like forever, but turned out to be two days. I woke up feeling feverish and thirsty, with a pounding headache and a bloody nose. Headache is too light a word for it; my head felt like it was literally going to split. I staggered to my feet and lurched down the hallway to the bathroom for some aspirin. The TV was still on, with some crazy sci-fi action movie playing.

The aspirin went down, hard and dry, and I scrubbed the blood off my face. Drifting into the kitchen, I grabbed a bottle of water and sat back down in the recliner, turning down the TV as I did so. The bong still had some weed in it, so I took a hit, my crazy dream still running through my head. I kept thinking about my parents, about Mom leaving, and how weird it was that I’d dreamed a chance to finally tell her what I thought. And that’s when things got weird…

After my mom left, she hadn’t visited much. I remember that clearly; it’s not the sort of thing you forget easily. But now I also remembered Dad telling me about her suicide, only months after she left. And while Dad had been left broken by her leaving and never visiting me, I also remembered him seemingly coming to terms with the divorce after her death. He’d been depressed and inconsolable, but now I also remember him gaining a sad but determined strength of character. Like her suicide somehow freed him to stop hating and start forgiving.

What. The. Fuck?!?

Both memories were just as clear, and thinking of both of them at the same time made the inside of my head shiver electrically. My eyes blurred and my head pounded even harder, so I let it go and went back to the bong.

And that’s the beginning, for what it’s worth. In the following weeks, I continued timeskipping. It didn’t happen very often, maybe once or twice a week, and it tended to happen when I was tired and/or fucked up, which caused me to cut back on my drug use. I mean, I did drugs so I didn’t have to think about this shit, not so I’d be forced to constantly relive it. The continual timeskipping combined with the non-stop news coverage of The Event to convince me I wasn’t completely crazy. For whatever reason, I was one of the 3%. I was one of the empowered. And all I could do was literally dwell on the past. Is it any wonder things got so fucked up so fast?