The Through Line (October 27, 2020)

I stood staring at the setting light, a light that would never set over the horizon line of the water. Because there was no horizon. The water just dragged on infinitely, covering the entirety of all of reality.

I dug in my heels turning on the sand. My feet stood upon a small sand shoal that couldn’t be more than four square feet. I looked towards the setting grey light. Neither was the sun or the moon, perpetually setting or rising. But they were not objects of substance nor gas. But simply light.

I closed my eyes and opened them again. The train was rumbling, I brushed my hand against the back of a seat as I walked down the isles of the train. I looked out the window to see the countryside flying past. 

The carriage rocked slightly, I stopped and looked at a child and his mother. The child would have turned nine tomorrow, they were on their way to his father. For when his parents had divorced the father had stayed in the family home in the country. The mother had moved to the city looking for work.

The woman had found work, and secretly, both her and her ex husband were disappointed that their marriage had ended. I closed my eyes again, and sent myself reeling down the hundred of thousands and millions of possibilities of where these two would end up. Nearly all of them were the same.

I pulled back to the present. The further forward you got the more dark the future became, as each individual decision a human could make, splintered time more. But individuality they tangled together, here, all to make one line. I was not capable of seeing every time line, for even reaching just years into the future there were trillions. It would break me. I was not it.

I walked through the train. No one saw me, they couldn’t not anymore, they had forgotten how to look. None of them knew what was coming, and there was nothing I could to stop it without risking too many more.

I walked to the drivers compartment and slid open the door. The driver turned around, but to him the door was still closed. He rubbed his chest, then looked back at the tracks. There was a steep curve up ahead and he would need to drastically slow the train. 

The time lines were collapsing and I knew what was going to happen. He turned around. “Mis, how did you get in here” He went to stand up then collapsed, clasping his chest. He was gasping, I knelt down. “Don’t worry, it’s not your fault. Go with peace. I'll be here.” And the man left, traveling home. I stood up away from the body.

The turn was coming up. The train would derail. A hundred different factors had led to this moment and if any of them had been different this would not have happened. All I would need to do was pull a lever and all of these people would not die. 

But that would mean war, war that would not just kill those I tried to save, but everyone. It was not yet time. I turned my back to the window as I felt the train rocking, and I closed my eyes.

The winds whistled over the flat expense of the desert, from the rocky mountain topsides all looked small. In the distance, driving across the only road a car. Inside the passengers of the car looked out upon the deserts' yellow sands. The sands gently kick up blowing into dust devils. The car crosses over then a bridge, leaving the desert, they would continue on.

On to a city, where. If time followed the most likely path, as it too often did. One of them would die. One would become something that all who had known him feared and the last would do something great. But what none of them knew was this was the last time any of them would see each other in person.

A face, one that I did not recognize flashed before my eyes and memory. I turned around and walked through space, trusting that I would be where I need to be. I stepped forward onto a bustling street in London. I needed to find her, and help her. I did not know why, but it was not my place to know why. 

I started walking down the road, the people just slid around me. No one is looking to see me. I slowed as I reached a house. The lock clicked and I opened the door, a man and woman stood in their home arguing. “You have to go to school.”

“Dad you don’t know how bad they are.” 

The man looked down at his watch, “toughen up, I can't have this conversion with you again. I’m already late for work. I’ll see you when I get home. I love you." He ran to the door, unlocked it, then closed it behind him as he left. 

The daughter plopped to the ground and started crying. I let myself wonder through time looking back and forward.  The two of them had moved here after her mother had died. The daughter had spent the last year down playing how bad the bullying was. 

If the father actually knew he would want to kill a couple of people and she would no longer be in that school. I sat down on the couch, then clasped my hands together, closing my eyes, I felt every-thing pass between my hands. I breathed in feeling, I opened my eyes. 

The entire universe had come to a halt on this moment. I waved my hand and the girl joined me in that strange place outside of everything, and within everything. Yet we were still just physically sitting in her living room. 

She wiped her cheek and stood up turning to go upstairs and grab her bag. She yelped when she saw me, then screamed, stumbling back. 

She turned and ran, screaming “help!” She threw open the door and ran outside.

I uncrossed my feet, stood up and went outside too. The streets were frozen, people stopped in their tracks, the cars were all sitting still.

“Come with me daughter.”

She turned around and as she did the wind struck up, it wiped the hair in her eyes. I willed it to be, and we were standing on a mountain side. She gasped, stumbling back. 

“What’s happening!” She yelled. 

I looked out at the valley, I had seen this place before. But it had been many years ago, before humans of Europe had ever seen it. It was not as beautiful as it had been all those years ago.

The girl stepped up to my shoulder, amazement replacing her terror. “I know this place. It was the last trip I went on with my mother. She took me and some of my friends here. Who are you, how did we get here?!”

“Why here is up to you. You’re the one who took us here. Something important that you must remember.”

She looked out again. “I?” She had remembered, the good times, the friends, the pain of a loss. 

“Take me hand.”

She looked at me suspiciously, but trusted and took my hand.

I ran to the edge of the cliff and jumped and holding her hand, she screamed. Me closing my eyes, we fell back through time. Traveling through memory and existence back to time in which all was set. Simply walking back along the rope of time.

Our feet hit gently against the beach. The water lapped to the shore. “Where are we?” She asked. I sat down in the sand, it moved and did not move. This was nothing more than a memory of time. One that could change yet for a moment. As if I was nothing more then a single drop of water in a still lake. Causing ripples, but always it would return to what it had been. 

“Where, the coast of South America. When 1582, march 7th.” She sat down with me, also looking towards the ocean and setting sun. 

“Who, what are you?”

I laughed. “That doesn’t matter.”

She looked back to the sun, “Am I dead? Why did you bring me here? It's pretty, but I’ve seen sunsets on the ocean before.”

I smiled, “no not dead, so you can't understand what this is yet. And this not just another sunset. It is the most beautiful sunset this world has yet known. And this is the best place to watch it.”

“What makes this one special?”

“O, just wait.” 

The sun started setting into the ocean, the war, air hitting the chilling ocean causing a mist to go flaring up. Slowly the stars started coming out as well as the southern lights. A solar flare hitting the earth was letting the lights be seen this far north in their full color and beauty. 

And we watched the sun disappear. I stood to my feet, “do you understand?”

“Wow, I don’t think I do.”

“Love is a brief thing, trust is a strong thing, and you are never alone, beauty is found in all things. Have a strong child.”

As I said the last words time faded back to the present and we were back in her living room. “You are more child, you are loved. Farewell, I will always be here if you need me.” 

Time came back into motion with a gentle pop. The memory of me quickly fading from her mind. The memory, but not the feeling. She whipped the tears from her cheek and stood up, walking right passed me. 

I looked forward to her future. It was brighter, I smiled. 

I turned and walked out the door. My feet hit the bare grass. I started walking up the dirt lane towards the house. The house was home to a man that I had visited often. The porch light was on and a sleeping man was rocking back and forth. 

He would not sleep much longer. He was old, he had seen much, and done much, he had up slipped and he failed often. But he had helped many people, but it was his time. 

The man stirred as I sat down in the chair next to him. He opened his eyes and looked at me. Truly looked at me, understanding at least partially, what I was, who I was. 

The man had grey hair, a wrinkled face. Kind eyes, eyes that had looked upon hundreds with the gaze. His knurled hands clenched the arms of the chair.

“So is it time?”

“Almost.”

“Can I sit with you and talk for a little while?

“Of course.”

“Do you, people come and collect, every soul.”

“It depends.”

The man nodded as if this made sense to him, and maybe it did. “I remember now.” He said. “Talking to you before, I think I always remembered, but just forgot.” He laughed. “I thought I wanted to be an EMT. You handed a bible and said ‘you can help so many more.’”

I remembered as well. The expression on his face as he blinked back into reality, forgetting, and saw the Bible laying on the nightstand. “All those years. Did I help more?” The old man asked. 

“See for yourself.”

I waved my hand and time split, millions of hours rushed by in the two timelines, one long gone possibility, and the other the truth. As a medic dozens of lives helped, then spreading out into hundreds.

As the man who he was spreading out into hundreds and hundreds of thousands. People he would never meet, families he would never know. All somehow, helped directly by what he had done.

I blinked, and the time faded away, and we were still sitting on the chairs. He smiled. “Who could have known?” He looked at me, “I am I to guess my religion was right since you're here?”

I laughed, “it certainly wasn’t wrong.”

“What does that mean.”

“The reality upon which I exist and known is far more than any human, or book, or people, or society could understand.”

“I still don't think I understand?”

“You are a single bacterium on the back of an ant. You cannot claim to understand the entirety of the ant. That ant is right now, this moment, every human on earth right now. The colony is all of humanity, and it’s time. It is my privilege to be as a human in this particular example, a human whose only purpose and joy is in the thriving of the colony. But even so, as a human, I cannot claim to understand the whole of the universe. That is the scale upon which you are entering. From bacteria to star.”

“Is the beyond really that grand?”

“You live in the ‘beyond’ right now, just in part you cannot understand. You are like an unborn child that is to the entire world. So it is time you come to began to understand that there is much more than you could possibly know now.”

“So why do you tell me this, and not others?” 

“Because you want me to.”

“Are you not a prisoner to the will of,” he waved, “the above, the universe? Me?” 

“Do you believe your kindergarten teacher lives at the school?

“No.”

“As so, they can leave, they can quit, they have entire lives far more than children that they teach and care for can know. I can leave, I can go. But why leave something that I love.”

“I think I understand, more.” He said cautiously.

“That’s why I've always been fond of you. More so than other humans you expect to know nothing, and yet somehow you almost always know more.”

“Thank you. I think I’m ready to go.” 

The man stood up, his face lean, long black hair slicked back. He looked back at the now still body slumped in the still rocking chair. He took a deep breath. “Now what?”

I shrugged, and gestured back down the path, “you walk.”

He turned and started walking down the gravel road into the night. He faded away into that night and as soon as he had disappeared from my sight, I felt that he was no longer here. He had gone. I stood up and closed my eyes. 

I stood on a sandy island, surrounded by an infinite ocean. One where the moon would never set, and neither would the sun. The waves were rising, sucking back the water from my island and exposing more sand. 

Then they crashed back down to where they had been. The breeze washed over, a breeze that smelled of spring, of life. I lifted my hands, and the ocean stilled, the breeze slowed into a whisper. 

The sand moved under my feet. This place was not real, or it was a since it was just in my mind. But that made real, even if it never truly existed. There was so much pain, the images flashed across the waters of so many hurting.

So much that I wanted to do, that I couldn't prevent. But there were many more that I could help. My eyes focused on one face. I closed my eyes, dug in my feels and spun. Turning through space, through time, through reality.

Going to the place that I needed to be, when I needed to be. And when I stopped, I knew I was where I needed to be.