Living In The Past

[StarMountainKid]

Living In The Past

 

I spent several years in stasis. Well, I’m not sure how long. Maybe it was ten or a hundred years or maybe a thousand. I think now many thousands. I can never be sure. It was just an instant for me. I’m not certain why I even did it. Bored maybe or just to see what would happen. One can be too curious.

 

The device was my idea. I worked on the Project that didn’t really work out the way we had intended. I won’t go into that, we all know the result. Anyway, I got the idea working on the Project, as I say, and I built the machine afterwards.

 

It’s a strange feeling now that I’m living in the past. Well, it’s not really the past for me; it’s just everyone else’s past. Everybody else is really living some time in my future which is their present.

 

It’s interesting to think of everyone I know alive way off in some distant future, a future I can never reach. It’s more a melancholy feeling, really, a sad feeling. I can never know these people the way they are now, like I used to. They’re all living beyond the horizon, and I will never be able to reach out and touch them.

 

But my present isn’t so bad. It’s just that everyone here and now are ghosts in a way. Nothing is really real, living in everyone’s past.

 

The other thing is, everybody is already dead most likely. Generations and generations ahead are the alive ones. I’m dead too in that future present. Only I know this. I destroyed the machine the other day. I didn’t want anyone else to experience my experience. It’s difficult living with ghosts.

 

On the other hand, to everyone else life goes on as normal, but for me I’m the ghost. I can’t communicate. What I mean is, I’ve lost my timeline. I’m a lost soul drifting aimlessly in a dream. I’m here and my friends notice me, but I can have no influence on them. Their past in which I live is settled and cannot be changed.

 

There is no way forward for me. I can’t catch up to my present because my present is still in the future. At the horizon of the real present I am already long dead. Dead and forgotten. If I built a machine to take me to that far horizon, a skeleton of dust would arrive.

 

So I live my invisible life among the living, wandering here and there, only watching. It’s kind of funny, but to my friends I just disappeared one day and reappeared as a kind of stranger. I can’t quite make out me from their perspective. I think I’m like someone who they don’t take seriously, like a hanger-on who is of no consequence.

 

That’s who I am now. A person of no consequence. Maybe that’s who I have always been. Maybe that’s why I built the machine. A conformation of who I really was.

 

I have some advice for you. Never be too curious, never live in everyone’s past, and never become who you really are. Nothing good will come of it.