Time Travel #1

Why do I get myself into these kind of things? Every time things seem to be going great, something abrupt occurs. The girl in Paris in 1923, the wolf in the forest in god knows what year, Hitler in 1969 (yes, he is indeed still alive; these are the kind of “things” that I get myself into). The saddest part is, all I wanted was an authentic Cuban cigar from 1962. But with that came avoiding Fidel, going back to JFK’s birth, and ultimately ending up in Ireland in 1811? What’s peculiar is that every time I end up at another place in another time, I do not know how it will go down.  I could be in the middle of a pancake breakfast with a member of John Gotti’s mob, and all of a sudden I’ll feel my nerve get pinched and I’ll blink and now I’m in a farm in Nebraska. Everything sounds like a blur right now because, in fact, that’s exactly what it is. One is always prompted to ask the question, “why me?” and it is I that now proposes the question. Having the ability to go to all the different eras I’ve been is more a curse than a blessing. Sure, sometimes I will suddenly have a nice outfit on and money in my pocket, but that just as quickly disappear once I travel through to another place. Travel is a funny word for me to use in this situation, because usually one associates that word with a journey. My travels are never journeys. Instead, they are flashes. One place to the next without any warning, any preview, any vision, any idea. I just want to go back to the life I lived before all of this happened to me. I don’t know what caused this upon me; as far as I know I could simply be hallucinating. 1984 Britain was an alright place for me. I was safe and I had a life going. Now the future’s so unwritten. I had a glimpse of what’s to come when I went to the end of 1999 for about 30 minutes. Everything was burning, everyone was screaming, and it seemed as if an apocalypse was upon me. I saw a newspaper on the ground with the date December 31 on it, and the headline read “IT ALL ENDS TONIGHT”. A man came running up to me screaming belligerent gibberish that I really could not comprehend. And just like that, there was the feeling in the nerves, and I was on a desolate mountain in a place I did not recognize. Did the world actually end after 1999? Would I ever be able to see anything in the 2000s? I can only wonder…

-N.G.