Adrift in time

Each day I wake up at a different point in time but still in my same life. However can changing the past change the future?

My name is H and I was born on 14th November 1965, and died on 22nd April 2047 aged 81. After the second date, that was when I learned to time travel.

To say I learned is perhaps over exaggerating. My was a slow and laborious one that I wont bore you with the details, and then it came as in so many of the stereotypes. I was whizzing towards a brightness and there it was – my life images from memory flashing in front of my mind’s eye. My first kiss with my first girlfriend at 14; friends; family; graduating from college (24th of a class of 41), all the notable events of my life, and then it was over in a flash of light, and then I woke up again.

I blinked and looked round at the youthful girl on my arm. She had red hair and freckles and smiled widely exposing a row of white teeth partially exposed by braces. She wore a red patterned dress and looked excited as she snuggled into me. We were in the movies. The cinema in front of us was full and on screen (ironically, Back to the future was playing). What the…? I thought, and realized who the pretty girl on my arm was. “Beth?” I gasped, but in a purer sweeter voice than I realised I ever had, having got used to my dieing croak. Could this really be my college sweetheart. We had dated for almost a year, and although I treasured our time together and loved her dearly, I broke her heart by dating one of her friends too. That was the thing I was full of hormones back then gushing for an outlet

“Yeah?” she answered.

I realized a couple of things fairly quickly.

• A this wasn’t real. I was dieing or dead in a hospital bed nearly seventy years in the future, and
• B she would think I was a nut if I was just checking who she was, “You look really hot tonight” I said lamely.

“Thanks”, she said and giggled “So do you”. She leaned towards me and turned her head up for a kiss. Her lips were soft and tender and so unexpected, just like the hardon I now had that took about a second to appear. I blinked during the kiss, shocked at my reaction, having not had one for so many years. I wondered if I could fuck her in the back row in the darkness. Would my dream director allow it? He who makes the rules, who decrees that you wake before you hit the ground when you fall off a twenty storey building? That you never have the strength to fight the monster in your dreams, and that although you’re running as fast as you can from it, the monster is just over you’re shoulder but never catches you. Would he allow me the time to get this angel’s pants off and fuck her? I supposed I could try and find out. I pulled her to me and slid my hand quickly up her bare thighs, to her pants and grabbed the material and pulled at it.

It was the wrong move. She stood up instantly, shocked. “Billy!” she shouted once, then turned and dashed past the knees of the other patrons and out of the cinema. I sat there dazed for a moment and after seeing the other heads bobbing up and turning to see what was happening, I got up and followed her. By the time I got to the front entrance, she was nowhere to be seen. Everything was real or at least real enough that I could not tell any difference. I touched the wood of the ticket booth, feeling the texture and saw the places where the paint was peeling. Unbelievable. I could smell diesel fumes from the bus stop just outside.There has never been a dream so real.