A Timeless Journey (32 page)

Every sentence that he tried to put together was chaotic and he barely made sense. His excitement was evident for the rest of us to see, since his hands couldn’t stop shaking.

After Chris, it was Lauren’s turn to meet Luna and while she was speaking to her with eyes closed, I had a feeling looking at Sophie’s face that she was going to decline meeting with Luna. Chris was still overexcited and couldn’t stop talking about the experience with the mind scrambler. Listening to him going on, I had a feeling that Sophie was now convinced I wasn’t crazy anymore and had told the truth from the very beginning.

As I expected, Sophie refused to meet with Luna and I was fine with it as long as she believed I wasn’t lying. It was never going to be easy for her to meet with the girl who was responsible for ruining her relationship. Even if they did virtually meet, I was sure that a friendly conversation between them was too much to ask for.

My idea of introducing my friends to Luna had worked. Now that they had seen and met Luna, they should be more sympathetic towards me. All I had to do the next day was let my parents have the same experience and things just might return to normal, at least for as long as I stayed in this reality.

I begged all three of them not to say anything about the mind scrambler’s existence as it was the only thing that kept me connected with Luna and my daughter. I left safe in the knowledge that my friend believed me now and I was happy for winning them back.

On my way home, I stopped and looked at the cloud-covered dark sky and thought of my baby girl. The fact that I was far away from her and was missing my daughter growing up made me release a long sigh of despair. In this instance, I knew what I had to do once I finished writing the whole story. I needed to move to the Playa Aserradero beach in the Dominican Republic and wait for the anomaly to reappear. If for some reason, I wasn’t going to earn much from publishing this novel, surely I would be able to get a job at the holiday resort where we stayed.

Although it was near four in the morning, I didn’t feel sleepy. I lay in bed with my eyes wide open thinking of Luna and Sky. Since I had to stay awake the next night too, I forced myself to sleep. I had to have some rest before my parents met Luna. Before I closed my eyes, I thought how much I missed my future bed with the live view of space travel.

The excitement of convincing my friends that I had told the truth had pushed away my need for sleep. Once the adrenaline wore off and the thoughts of my life in the future exhausted my brain, I drifted away to my sleep.

40

My parents had the chance to see Luna and Sky the very next night and the look on their faces when they woke up on Sunday late morning wasn’t just shock, but happiness as well. They had seen and virtually held their granddaughter and talked with Luna. Now, not only did they believed my story, but also urged me to find a way at all costs to return to the future and be with my family.

I am aware that it isn’t easy for them to approve of their son disappearing forever from their lives, but I guess my happiness and my future was more important to them than forcing me to stay at home. They had seen Luna and Sky and how beautiful they were and they just couldn’t stop talking about them.

I accepted a heartfelt apology from my parents for not believing me, together with a lot of questions about the time I spent in the future. I tried to describe how the world has changed, without saying too much about what was going to happen in the next few years, and they listened to my stories as if they were children with a thirst for knowledge.

The impossible truth of my time travel became a fact of our everyday lives in the days that followed up to this very moment. Every so often my parents would stay up late and beg me to meet Luna and virtually hold their granddaughter. Luna on the other hand, enjoyed talking to my parents and was amazed by the togetherness we showed as a family. She finally understood why I had to return to my old reality and let my parents know. According to her there was a special bond between family members in the 21
st
century, something that she thought was amiss in the 26
th
century. She valued the unconditioned love and the simplicity of the relationship between family members.

After proving to my parents that I had been right all along, our relationship returned to normality and now they understood why I had to leave Sophie. Although at home we spoke openly between us about my time travel adventures, we all agreed to keep this line of conversation private within the house walls and save us the trouble of being branded insane by a suspicious society.

My friendship with Chris and Lauren steadily rekindled to where it used to be before my break-up with Sophie. As for Sophie, she still finds it hard to accept the new reality and being just friends seems not to be her priority. Although I am madly in love with Luna, there is always going to be some affection residue for Sophie, left from the time we spent together.  From my point of view, I believe, just as I still savour some affection for her, she may experience the same feelings for me, or maybe stronger.

I also believe it is her wish and her struggle to forget an important part of her life, which has pushed Sophie away from accepting my friendship. I do hope that one day she will lay her eyes on someone and, just like Luna and I, will fall in love at first sight. Until this happens, I have nothing but sympathy and guilt for what she is going through.

It is the last few pages of this story and very likely that today I will finish it. I have been writing this story for the last three months and here I am now at the end of it, happy to be able to finish it successfully. Soon, I will be able to return to the beach in the Dominical Republic and wait for the miracle to happen again.

I do hope to have described the events I have lived through in the last two years to the best of my literary ability, although sometimes it hasn’t been easy for me to describe a world which is so far away from everyone’s imagination. The future I have seen is radically different in every way from this reality. Everything in the 21
st
century seems outdated compare to the future. I have spent two years over there and now I find it hard to re-adapt to my previous way of living.

There is a lot of injustice, poverty and greed in this reality and it is all intentionally caused by us, humans. Once you experience the ways of the advanced society of the future, you find it hard to accept the way people behave in the 21
st
century. Greed, selfishness and discrimination feed our ego every day. The ego doesn’t allow most people to accept their fellow humans’ success and happiness by instinctively replacing it with jealousy and sometimes, hostility.

The way how some of us judge others by their looks, or by the way they dress when this is different from their own taste, the way some of us treat someone if their way of thinking differs and so many other egomaniac issues between us humans, makes the 21
st
century’s society intolerant, false and challenging. The world we live today is not a very nice place for everyone and, no matter how much I protest, there is little hope for immediate and radical change. It would take a lot of generations and a lot of fundamental changes to our way of living, to arrive at the high standards I have witnessed in the future. If someone from the far future had to travel back in time to this reality, with certainty, he or she would arrive at the conclusion that this is a primitive and depressing world.

It is true, there are no immediate solutions to our current infrastructure and it is not possible to have the most advanced technology known to Universe straightaway. Nothing can be updated to perfection as if by magic. We have to work hard to be technologically and scientifically advanced, but what we can easily do, is change the primitive way we think and behave. We have a conscience which makes us understand and feel the guilt, makes us understand why we should be educated and a conscience that keeps our morals in check, if we chose to have morals.

If we chose to tell the truth all the time, no matter how much it might affect our selfish needs or the selfish ego of others, including politicians and governments, if we all were able to dispel greed and selfishness, accept without jealousy the existence of diversity that characterises each individual and, above all, if we stop judging others for the way they chose to live their lives, we might not appear as primitive as we appear now.

Planet Earth is a beautiful and remarkable place. Us humans, as the only intelligent beings that temporarily inhabit this miracle of nature, the least we can do is to stop polluting and destroying it with our misuse of knowledge and lack of conscience which ironically is given to us by the same Mother Nature. We take for granted everything we have and sadly there is little appreciation from the majority of the people for the small details surrounding us.

This is why I prefer the future, everything in the 26
th
century is fair, safe and no one wastes their time thinking how to deceive others. I may never make it back there, who knows! All I know is with what I saw in the future, I will do anything to leave this primitive and unchangeable reality.

The moment I will write the last words of this story, will be the moment I prepare to travel back to the beach in the Dominican Republic. When I will arrive there, I hope fate will be kind enough to me and make the anomaly appear again.

As I sit in the gazebo at the bottom of my garden this evening, taking a break from writing these very words, the smell of the rain on the wet grass is touching my senses in a way that is bringing a melancholy feeling to me. I look up at the sky thinking of my daughter. The shining full moon, which keeps hiding between the passing rainy clouds, smiles back at me. “Luna and Sky”, I say half aloud with a wry smile on my face. Only the mere mention of their names creates a vortex of happiness in my mind, and my chest feels tighter. For a while, I get lost in my thoughts as I imagine their faces smiling back at me.

It is funny how things turned out to be. When I went through the anomaly and landed in the 26
th
century, my only objective was to find a way to return home and now that I am home with my friends and family, all I want to do is return to the future. As much as I wish for a time device, I am aware it is impossible to find one in this reality. The fact that I cannot do anything to travel back to Luna and Sky, makes me feel lost and powerless.

Once I make sure this novel have seen the light of day, I will go back to that beach and wait every night for the anomaly to appear again. I don’t know how fortunate I will be to have another chance, but I know that I will never give up waiting even if it means throwing my whole life away.

There is no doubt in what I want when it comes to choose when and where I prefer to live. Between the 21
st
century’s society and the future one, between today’s technology and the future advanced technology, between the mess this reality is and the peaceful and happy future, I would choose the future every time. The thought that one day I am going to physically hold Luna and baby Sky in my arms again, gives me hope and pushes me to search for the anomaly tirelessly.  

These are my last words of this incredible story. Soon, I am going to travel back to the beach and I will be waiting on that stretch of white sand facing the North Atlantic waters patiently every night with the hope of seeing the anomaly again. My name is Scott Patterson and if one day, I do disappear without a trace from this world, you will know that I have finally made it back to where I really belong, with my new family in the 26
th
century.

THE END