Flashback

I remember when I was travelling forwards, and nothing seemed to bother me. Now I am going backwards, and it’s happening fast, with a sickening feeling in my stomach. I don’t want to go back, I really don’t, my thoughts pound as I am strapped in, and the date and time details set. 

Time travel is experimental and yet someone must do it, to improve the science. I want it, I don't want it, over and over, my indecision rattled until the need to go back took over, and I found myself signing over all my rights to my mind, my body and most of, to time. I was told it could be a one-way ticket, and I didn’t care. In that moment at least, I didn’t care. I just wanted. I didn’t belong here. I didn’t think that I might not belong in the past. I just wanted to go back and do it all again. I hoped for possibilities, that I could change things and be all powerful. I didn’t see a future that wasn’t in the past. 

That is the beginning, and before I go back, I am asked to write a journal entry about who I am now in 2025, and who I was in the year 2000. It is only then when I start writing I realise where I'm going. There is a flash back, and I cry out to say I have changed my mind. No one hears me due to the muscle relaxant, and it’s too late. I know what I will be hurtling towards. It is not the picture I painted to myself, to soothe myself, reality Is different. The present and the future seem now so appealing, now when out of reach I want it, yet when it was there for the taking  I hesitate, and why did I not want it. I begin to realise I do not know myself, so I think back to my journal entry for today and remember what I have written, and for the first time in a long time I feel something, and I remember it's called sadness.  

Friday 17th January 2025 

Journal entry 1. The present. 

My name is Louisa Mary Willis. I am 55 years old. I am nobody special, and I have no likes and dislikes. I don’t exist, and I am a ghost wondering through towns and cities, in and out of people’s life’s, I stand apart. I do not belong. I have brown hair, and of medium height. I used to work as a pharmacist until my memory and detachment made me scared that I would give the wrong pills. I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I didn’t want to affect anyone. When the headaches, and body pains started, I left citing ill health. I have a small amount of money left to me by my mother and it is running out. The payment from the trial will help secure my future, that is if I come back. It’s all I can do for myself, and I hope I got to change things, or have some great insight. It is Friday 17th January. I haven’t told anyone about this, it's my secret, and I said no goodbyes. I have interacted so little with people, and only on surface level I do not think anyone will miss me. I am not sure I will miss anyone as I stopped needing anyone. As I write this, I realise I miss that. I don’t miss feeling though, as I remember now what that last feeling was. 

Journal entry 2. The past. My name is Louisa Mary Willis. I am 30 years old. I am lying alone in a hospital bed, and pain is searing through my body. I know I was attacked, yet the details escape me and I can give little details to the police. No one knows I am here, and I don’t want anyone to know or see me like this. This is as much as I write when I know I have made a mistake. I don’t want to see myself like this. It is too late. 

It is too late; I am hurtling back. It feels like I am on a high-speed train going through a tunnel, seated backwards. Darkness, with a penetrating voice that counts down the years. Make it stop, I say now with timidity, as I know I can’t. I am powerless. I didn't have to do the trail, I chose it. I chose to walk down that street. If I hadn't gone out that night. If I hadn't walked that way. If I could fight like in the movies. If. What choices do I have?

Then I am there in the hospital room, and I see myself, lying there helpless in bed, with tubes, and my face a different colour. There is nowhere now for me to go except here, so I go sit in a chair by my bed. Doctors and nurses come and go, I don't think they see me. I am still a ghost. You're in pain and as I move closer, I start to feel it. You are looking around the room, now empty as the clinical staff have done their duties, and you see me. You're looking right at me, and I want to turn away, as I know you need me so much and I am not here, I am a ghost. There is nothing I can do, and then you reach out your hand and I see it is my hand. “Help me”, you say. “It’s going to be okay”, I say. I sit by my bed as you drift in and out of consciousness, and I keep telling myself it is going to be okay, as I close my eyes with exhaustion. 

I wake up and you are gone, a distant memory, and I am in a hospital room, and the electrodes are being taken off my head. I am asked how I feel. I feel old and I am very glad to be here, I tell them. A doctor laughs, and asks if I can make the session next week. No, I say. 

This time counts, and I know I have a future to look forward too.