On the very first page, I wrote, as if to convince myself, “Things will be different next year.”
Of course, I didn’t believe it, not for a minute, but I had determined on a course that would after all change everything anyway.
On the last page of the journal, which lay abandoned on the side of the road, next to a disposable mask, both of which I found in January, the day of the unexplained mass, chaotic formation of birds in the sky, before the pandemic had become an international phenomenon, there was a complicated mathematical formula. I was no more inclined to understanding such things then than I had been in my youth, although, if I had shown my brother, perhaps he might have. Sometimes in a family you will find disparate gifts, mutually confounding, I don’t know what to say.
Later in the year he called me wanting to discuss our father, who during the course of the pandemic had been troubling him in his apparent, obstinate, rank denial of the virus, and it occurred to me, again, the mysterious journal and its formula, but I still couldn’t bring myself to bring it up.
I was sure it was nothing, even the mask, having long been forgotten by March, when reactions were mobilizing, but recalled then, but then I read the formula out loud, and a curious thing happened.
I found myself transported through time. I knew this instantly because my surrounding were notably altered, buildings gone that had been there an instant earlier, new buildings that looked nothing like what I had seen before. Even the air smelled different.
The journal was still in my hand. On a hunch I read the formula again and found myself in what seemed roughly the same time I had departed, back to 2020.
That night I had trouble sleeping. I wasn’t even thinking about what I had discovered, what I had experienced, but more family troubles, the niece I had been forced to leave behind under regrettable but unavoidable circumstances, so precious to me but now for all intents and purposes lost to me, especially now, all travel discouraged, impossible, and for how long? This was a five-year-old who had been a four-year-old in our parting, four years in which our lives had been gloriously entwined, four years that had given my life more meaning than the previous thirty-four. And yet...
In the morning I pulled the journal to hand again, and started writing. Later, reading it back the results were gibberish. I didn’t even think of the formula, of time travel. In a few weeks, absently, having filled much of the journal with nonsensical thoughts, it happened to fall to the floor, and I found it left open to the formula.
And I felt powerless to resist it.
I traveled twenty times in twenty minutes, staying just long enough to catch my bearings. But there was a price. Although at first mindless to the effect, I found myself increasingly dulled in my thoughts. I couldn’t concentrate. Finally, I couldn’t even read the formula anymore. I had no idea when I was. I couldn’t concentrate at all.
What followed are matters I pieced together after the fact. It seemed I was twenty years in my relative future, and that I had used, in the end, my niece as a tether, a grounding fork in time. In the journal she had read my thoughts, how I somehow took credit for ending the pandemic, which I can’t explain now since the journal was subsequently destroyed, with it the formula, which bore me little pain. I was done with it anyway, and did not want to know anything more of it, much less find myself once again lost to its magic.
I parted from my niece with considerably more regret, and yet, the strange experiences I’d had also gave me a kind of solace, in the endless exigencies of life, and how too often we foolishly let them dictate our actions.
And that perhaps that was better worth considering than even the gift of time travel. Better to treasure real gifts. Better to appreciate what I once had, even if I no longer had it. Because some things can come around again, and in that way true magic is found.
