Future Perfect Past Tense

When I look back over the stories that make up my life, sometimes it's like the chicken and the egg. You know, which came first? "Time is nonlinear." It's only three words and so easy to agree with intellectually, but the experience of it? Well, let me give you an example.

When I was just starting to grow up too fast, my best friend introduced me to my first love. For the better part of the bus ride home my friend told me about this girl. She was amazing and beautiful and he had no idea if she liked him at all, but he had to find out. I still remember his exact words, "You have experience with the ladies; you have to talk to her for me." To this day I have no idea how he came to such an astoundingly wrong conclusion, but because he was my best friend and because neither of us had read Cyrano de Bergerac, I agreed to do as he asked.

That afternoon was the kind of hot that only comes on the back of an Indian Summer. The sky was ready to rain green, and she was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. Blonde hair and blue eyes; a cliché, I know, but she wore it well. When she spoke, it was all over for me. Her voice was deep, rough at the edges, utterly feminine, and made me quiver. After a while I pulled her aside to talk privately.

Swallowing my feelings for her, I readied myself to speak on my friend's behalf, but when I opened my mouth something peculiar happened. My vision blurred, like the air was humming and suddenly I was watching from the backseat. The conversation was short and sweet, and I was far more charming than any twelve year old boy has a right to be. She confessed that it was me she really liked, and asked her friend to deliver a close-but-no-cigar message to my friend. When he read it he didn't even look at me, he just got up and left.  I had gone to win her heart for him and kept it for myself instead. It was a betrayal and we both knew it. My sense of loyalty was outraged, but I was so disoriented all I could do was stand there with a dumb look on my face. One of the older kids came over, put a beer in my hand and said, "Don't worry, he'll get over it." I had never had a beer before, but I was positive it was exactly what I needed.

Now, I love a good cliché, so I don't mind telling you that I'll never forget that afternoon, but I will throw in a twist. I'll always remember that day because it's the first time I felt the hand of a Future Self moving me in a direction I had neither the social graces nor the experience to move in myself.

Running into a Future Self like that is both profound and unnervingly weird. What makes it weirder still for me is that in the narrative I've pieced together and called My Life, this event happens before I start working with time magick. The more you work with time, just how nonlinear it is really sinks in, and makes it very hard to say for sure who or what you really are. There's this strange feeling to it, like everything is totally predestined, but at the same time, feeling like you can do or change nearly anything. This contradiction and all the confusion it brings is enough to make anyone ask, "Why bother with time magick?" That's why I wanted to share this story in particular.

Eventually I patched things up with my friend, and though we still talk to this day, if I had never spoken with him again, that would have been okay. I had moments with that girl I wouldn't trade for anything. That slice of life we shared was so important to me that I reached out to myself across time to make sure it happened. This kind of thing can't happen in the 3d world with its linear concept of time, but because I've experienced it, I know there is more. Who doesn't want more, for themselves, their children, this planet? Yes, there is confusion; yes, things can go wrong, but because I want more; for and of the things I love, I push forward into this uncharted and un-chartable territory. No one said crashing the gates of Eden would be easy, but I promise you, it's worth it.