A World Unlike Any Other

I live my life now, many years transported into the future.  My hair has slowly grayed, a side effect from travel so far from my own time.  I find myself still in West Seattle, but in a strange changed form of it.  There are so many more people and so many more buildings and restaurants.  I hear the people around me complain that the newcomers are ruining everything and wonder if they realize that time and its effects do not make hair less gray and do not make cities any smaller.

The process of time travel such as mine is not simply going to sleep and waking up in the future or past.  All time must be passed in its order.  There is no skipping, there is just a strange blur as years go by like passing cars.  Some moments stretch and seem to go by a little slower than the rest but soon enough the rubberband snaps and I am flung headlong into the chaotic passage.

In these stretched moments I saw my wedding and Lisa as beautiful as anything I had ever seen.  But as I reached to touch her young, lovely face I was again surging futurebound.  Again a moment stretched and there was the face of my daughter and the first person I would ever know how to truly love.  I weep now as I did then.  A son.  Snap!  A house. Snap!  Hardship, and then not a house.  All the struggle that makes a marriage and a family richer for the effort.  All a fast-forward.  

There she is!  That beautiful little girl with so much optimism and love.  She is thirteen years old in this new time.  Thirteen!  But how?  She is this elegant stunning and strong woman.  So says everyone and I feel this protectiveness.  Somehow I must allow her just a little more childhood before the world reveals its true nature.  If not for her, at least for me.  I do not know how long I will be in this time and my heart is breaking to terrible, terrible pieces right here at the keyboard as I should be telling them all how much I love them and how truly sorry I am that I was pulled out of so many moments.

The travel is not simple and does not flow in only one direction.  Often I move back and forth and there are moments when I get to see a little more of a particular era than I had before.  This time I was taken to the basement of the house where I lived during the end of the 20th century, or perhaps the beginning of the 21st.  Only very briefly.  The phone rings and it is Lisa.  She is not my wife in this time.  She is the result of a very brief love affair involving two lonely people just before the Void. 

We had worked together and started a fling that was as ill fated as it was exciting.  In the end we separated and The world moved on in its predictable manner.  

She is telling me that she heard about my accident and that she just wanted to make sure that I was ok.  I assure her that I am fine and that I truly appreciate her concern.  

Here is the first moment changed by my removal from space and time.  Lisa and I were on a path to never see on another again.  There were no hard feelings in our breakup (if you can call it that after such a brief affair).  Now, after returning from the Void, she is on the phone!  

And a new arc begins to stray from the predictable path of an ordinary life.  Forward a year, I visit her at her work under the pretense that I stumbled into her by accident.  A few months later we are living together.  We have a dog.  A year after that we are married.  A year after that we have Molly.  Two years after that we have Adam.