In Retrospect

Thoughts in retro I

Hey there honeybee, how do you think the future will be?

That’s the question she would always ask me.

No more war and no more pain,

That’s how I’d answer, always the same.

Then she would smile and reply “Me too dear”;

Oh mother, I wonder how You would feel if You were here…

The Journey

I watched as he walked away, unable to follow. The glass column slowly began to descend until it surrounded me, trapping me so I could not change my mind and leave. I would no longer be able to step out into my world again. The thought of somewhere new permanently suddenly hit me and I mustered up all my energy to control my breathing: slowly and deeply.

The concern in his voice, when explaining the journey I would go on, was punctuated by the raise of his eyebrows revealing deep wrinkles in his forehead.

This project gifted us perspective. Stress was another offering from the project and it manifested in various ways. For the Professor, his hairline receded slightly to reveal a sliver of skin untouched by the Sun. Despite this shortcoming, it was worth it for the breakthrough, the Miracle.

My worries throughout the creation of the Miracle Machine suddenly paled in comparison to the concern that grew within me the longer I was locked inside that column. Sometimes we make decisions in life that involve big risks and we jump hurdles without thinking about what’s on the other side. This thought was the seed in my stomach that quickly grew into a forest of anxiety and blood-boiling fear.

Before I lost myself to the thoughts and voices of regret, I decided to switch my focus and I started to watch the Professor. He sauntered around the factory keeping tabs on the team whilst rushing back to his own stations to ensure everything was in order. It’s funny if you watched him and I in that moment. Two sides of the same coin of panic. He would be Heads since he had composure and thought about everything as the project progressed. His panic was distributed into many different moments, they were many small waves pushing against the shoreline at different points of the day. Mine was like a desert with no water and suddenly out of nowhere a tsunami appears and washes you away from the present into the unknown.

I envied that in him. He remained level headed whilst I was the Tails, the tsunami. As a result, stress looked different on us – he gradually lost some hair but was lucky that his beautiful dark stubble, Crow's Feet decorated eyes, and perfect teeth kept him irresistible. If you looked at me, you wouldn’t think I stressed at all, it manifests itself mentally rather than physically.

A sudden shiver attacked my spine but rather than leaving as quickly as it arrived, it lurked around and intensified with the cold that also began to creep over my body. Keep your focus on him, I told myself, distract yourself, lose yourself in his passion and his mannerisms. It was my last opportunity to do so, after all.

The invasive shiver finally left me but the cold intensified and threatened my ability to feel. I pinched my fingers to attempt to salvage any sensation of feeling as they were invaded by numbness. The cold air scraped at my eyes, and tears accumulated blurring my vision. As he commanded our team, he looked at me for a moment and smiled.

Technicians manned all seventeen stations as each engine produced balls of fire or sparks of electricity. The factory itself was probably warm and uncomfortable; my experience was anything but as the column filled with this white light eating away at my vision until my view was totally consumed by pitch white. Meanwhile, the uninviting unforgiving cold began to gnaw at my fingertips. I could hear the trilling engines and roaring of huge cantankerous machinery and I held onto that as the only familiarity I was left with. No sight, no touch, no taste and no smell – just sounds. As if to taunt me, as if on cue, everything went silent. Then I was alone. All I had were the blinding white and silence – I could begin to hear my thoughts of self-doubt and the overwhelming worry worked with the sheer bright empty whiteness to make my eyes water and pour. I had to clench my eyelids shut as I felt my eyes redden.

I was left alone. Isolated bar two things. Two companions.

This subtle yet constant ringing in my ears, like some sort of monotonous frequency in my head. like the ringing you hear after a loud night out. Tinnitus? At least it was something.

And I could hear myself breathe.

A third companion reminded me it was present. My thoughts. Where was I? Was I anywhere? Or was I nowhere at all – and was the machine going to work? Or would I be stuck here, marooned in the land of nothing – alone forever in the land that wasn’t even a land. The Nothing.

I brought a clock with me but it is as if it had lost its mind - if a clock had any sense to begin with; the arms spiralled furiously in a clockwise fashion. If I trusted the clock, I would tell you that I had been in the Nothing for months, verging on years. I swear it must have only have been minutes, yet each second of those minutes felt like whole eternities.

Alone with nothing in the Nothing and all I could do was focus on my breathing. I used this as a crutch for my own sanity; the sound of my lungs filling and emptying, of my survival, which started to speed up. Focusing too much on my breathing usually has this effect - in combination with my situation - my breaths become shallower as I failed to inhale and hold oxygen. My mind was on fire. My lungs were burning. This was how I panicked.

The ringing persisted in my ears but my thoughts and shallow breaths were no longer its sole companion. Humming? Shouting? They were distant, I was arriving somewhere. Or maybe I was starting to go mad and invent sounds in my head. I realised the sounds were definitely real and I added to them with my laughter of relief, my breathing returned back to normal. As the sounds got louder the intense white began to fade leaving shapes and colours in its wake.

The factory I left filled my vision as the pitch white slowly left, but machinery looked different. Where there were prominent pipes, arrogant bulbs, and large levers now saw compact wires, tiny indicators, and a series of homogenous switches - no two switches appearing the same.

A new sound found its way to my ears, the sound of glass creaking and cracking. As the white light continued to weaken and my vision restored, the column I was trapped in shattered. Curling up into a ball, I protected myself from the glass. Slowly. I stood up to survey the scene which displayed me at the epicentre of an outward explosion of glass. The deadly fragments of glass shone on the ground and sang the song of further breaking as he stepped over towards me.

He had the Professor’s eyes. The way in which he came to me and held my hands lightly as if I was as delicate as a feather and as precious as his heart. He wore the same uniform, the ecstatic glint of success filling his eyes, and his voice was as soothing. But… however… on the other hand, I noticed subtle yet significant differences between my version of Professor Hilm, Jakob Hilm, and that figure. The new edition is old. His dark hair resembled a mixture of white chalk and black coal; the wrinkles on his face deepened with the years but some wrinkles were out of place; his eyes illustrated more age, patience, and stress than ever before.

I prepared myself to say goodbye to everyone I knew and loved. I thought I was ready. Once I set my eyes on the aged apparition of the man I once knew and my brain processed who it was, I knew. That was it. There certainly was no going back ever again.

My eyes were red and raw, my head started to spin, and I was in no state to explore. I had to go through a series of Reception Remedies. That’s what we called them: eye-drops; ear tests and drilling; sleep; and finally, a Preparation Lecture.

Thoughts in retro II

What will the World will see in a hundred years?

Perhaps peace, flying cars, and humans in space.

Fast-forward wars, blood, sweat and so many tears;

The lack of change in humanity is a disgrace.

The Lecture

Write everything down. Use a reflective journal. That’s what they told me to do. Write down what you think in retrospect. Write down how you feel. Then they followed those instructions with the lecture. I loved learning history at school but this history was my future. My old future – learning it was emotionally draining.

The Professor sat next to me – at least I pretended it was him. It must have been his grandson, but I imagined it was him to hold onto familiarity, onto comfort. I could smell his perfume; I don’t think the man next to me actually wore any, but I could still smell his grandfather’s perfume. It was comforting; I stayed within the borders of my façade and prepared myself.

Nothing could have prepared me for this.

We won the Great War of the World. A rush of euphoria took hold of my body and I tensed slightly, squeezing the Professor’s hand. I screamed out loud with such joy before considering the cost of victory. It had taken around twenty million people. Twenty million.

STOP!

This was where I asked for my first break. It took me a while to process but then my mind wondered and wandered. What if I considered the deaths outside the War? Unconfined to the War, how many people have died in the past century? After all, I was a century in the future.

My heart filled with sorrow at the thought of an unimaginable ocean upon oceans of humanity that had faded. That mourning was joined with pain – not a physical pain, but an empty pain that accompanies an existential crisis. So much emotion riddled my soul that I began to dissociate. Tears flooded my eyes and streamed down my face. I could taste my sadness in the form of my salty tears. I cried for such a long time that my eyes pained and my jaw began to hurt.

After an hour of silent contemplation, I asked for the lesson to continue; just wanting it to finish. I had exhausted every essence of energy and emotion within me, I was numb and ready for anything else.

World War Two.

New Clear weapons?

The Cold War.

Man on the moon.

Gender equality.

Race equality?

Overpopulation!

Global warming.

The point they ended on was disease.

I had run from the Spanish Flu and had arrived in a world where a Virus caused humanity to shelter.

Thoughts in retro III

What we wear, what we eat, what we breathe,

Time has changed these.

Are we good? Are we happy? Are we free?

Give me time and I’ll see.

Socially, time has made us inclusive,

For greed, we remain as intrusive.

Money over man, or friend over coin?

Whatever the year, the answer will disappoint.

The Outside

After that lesson I felt overwhelmed for weeks, maybe even months. Our team, or should I say their grandchildren, did some tests to evaluate my psychological state and upon satisfactory results assigned me to a house, and gave me my bank details – thank God for compound interest and time travel, you should try it!

I was free.

I stood in the doorway of that factory and looked outside. Some buildings looked like they were made from glass and they rose into the misty sky as if they touched the heavens themselves. Roads were filled with cars, shiny multicoloured toys that looked like they were designed with as much care and emphasis on the exterior than the interior. These cars left trails of dirty smoke which lost its colour and shape, but not smell, in the sky. I could even taste oil and metals in the air amongst the flavour of melting snow. The air felt different, somehow it felt slightly heavier in my lungs as if my lungs had to work harder.

For ten minutes I was a child again, I ran out into the snow and collected as much as I could in my hands. Compressing it all together, I formed a ball and rolled it into more snow on the ground. Five minutes later and I had made a naked snowman. A Snowman of the Future.

Thoughts in retro IV:

It’s been five years and I understand the Future better now. When you’re given everything in one go, it’s hard to swallow but living through some of the differences is a different case entirely.

They told me that war was over. America is fighting Afghanistan. Yemen is at war with itself. America is fighting Iran. India is fighting Pakistan. North Korea is at a stand-off with America. I’ve barely scratched the surface, there is more conflict than I can discuss – but why is there so much war?

Did we not fight for peace in the Great War? People fight over money, power, land, belief, and tensions. Does all of this really matter more than life? Peace seems to be unattainable – a goal that history of past and future shall never achieve.

When I was a little girl, I would climb the kitchen table for the chocolates in the cupboard. Without fail, my mother would always catch me. Get down from there munchkin, she would sing as she lifted me and held me close. She smelled like soap, clean and orangey. That smell was odd at first but I got used to it as a marker for home, for safety, for mummy. I would always say Sorry, every time. After the third attempt, she looked me in the eyes and laughed. She would poke me on the nose and said something that remains with me to this very day:

If you say sorry and continue to do what you apologised for, are you really sorry?

If you fight for peace but the continue to fight, did you really want peace to begin with? The thought of nuclear weapons makes me shudder – a weapon that destroys the atom. Sometimes I think about my time, we thought we would fight The War to End All Wars. Instead it feels like it was a warm up.

The informers claimed that man and woman are equal but that statement barely scratches the surface. Ethiopia. Saudi Arabia. Afghanistan. Pakistan. Egypt. Nigeria. These are just few countries that neglect women’s rights to vote. Yes, I am happy that we have the freedom to vote in the UK, but it disappoints me to say that it took 100 years for some women to get the vote. Some countries do this through extreme patriarchy whilst others religious law; it is not fair to govern people by your beliefs – tying into abortion. It may be your religion, but this is my body, my life, and my baby! The country belongs to its people, let them live free in their choices and lives unless they wish to harm others. Sadly, we only have the power to fight in our country and some people don’t even have the freedom to protest. Some people risk their lives to make a change!

On the subject of equality, I was at a pub four months ago and I was curious about the tomato and coriander soup. I scoped out the interior and found someone with that very order. The dish itself looked quite nice but I thought it was perhaps too tomato-y. Then I realised the man sat with it cupped his hands around his nose, struggling not to bleed into his food any more. I went up to him and took the seat opposite him after handing him my pack of tissues. I thought he had got into a fight with another man but it turns out his partner had been hitting him for months. This was the first time she ever did so in public – he told me how everyone reacted. Some people turned their heads and watched with awkward smiles, some turning to their friends and others recording the ordeal. Laughter. Humiliation. If the roles were reversed and he hit her, I am sure the whole bar would have finished him off.

I’ve noticed that the level of insecure men and women has increased over the past century. The media is a relatively new creation and the internet and its availability means everyone and anyone in developed countries has unattainable goals advertised. At least this is equal between genders!

It’s shocking that the goal for women is to have as much fat in certain places but be unhealthily petite with a size zero waist. And all the male models look like they’re made from circles and circles of muscle. The industry for liposuction, implants, and steroids must be doing well. Medical procedures for aesthetic purposes.

I have so much more to say but they limited me to 3000 words.

What can I say?

Perhaps I could try next century? Maybe humanity will finally achieve peace, equality, and unity.

I doubt it, don’t get your hopes up!