4.13.1984.

April 13, 1984.

The End.

What happens when you die?

I wish I would've known the answer

before now

when I'm

dying.

February 26, 1984.

Miami Grand Prix.

I took photos of her face.

Bloody,

streaked with an unholy combination of

tears and makeup and gore.

You could tell,

beneath the carnage

that she used to be

beautiful.

The idea of it,

the disconnect between was and is

thrilled me.

and thus began my quest.

February 1, 1984.

Sent to observe.

Arrival.

Phone in one hand

and new identity in the other.

I marveled

at the name I had assumed,

at the way it felt coming from my tongue.

A good name to blend in.

A good name to hide.

A good name to

take pictures with forbidden tech

from the sidelines

watching history

in first person.

March 5, 1984

When the gas station condom broke.

She looked at me with wide eyes and I

sobbed.

A facade of love that became a little too real.

I hope that she knew,

in the following moments,

that I, her lover,

would not be the one

that killed her.

She was killed by something far larger

than both of us,

some cosmic fury

that retaliated

against the imbalance.

Even as I photographed

her still living eyes

forbidden to intervene.

I should never

have accepted

her invitation.

Should never have joined her

in her apartment.

I had planted a seed, however

unintentionally

and she was paying for it,

history scrambling to erase

what I'd done.

She looked at me with wide eyes,

could not contemplate what was happening

as her body

dissolved.

I photographed the space

where she used to be.

March 18, 1984.

Her name was Theresa.

I've started to realize

the implications

of what I'm doing.

Not in the future,

but here. In the

past

where consequences are beginning

to feel too real.

Do you think

they will take me back

into the present?

I am

out of place.

Starving for touch

as everything I feel

crumbles to ash.

I found her body and dragged it

towards Canaveral Groves,

where I hoped

she'd be

remembered.

Watched the news

and waited

until I saw

her name,

five days later.

I took a photo of the headlines

a sick trophy of my good deed

that did not save her life

but gave her

a proper Death.

March 20th, 1984.

A blow dryer and super glue.

She was blind.

A deer in headlights she saw

the flash of my camera.

A flash she should not have been able to see.

I watched her cry super glue

watched it melt like crayons under a hair dryer

watched her run.

She cannot outrun the Fates.

They are after us both.

March 23, 1984.

And she fell, bleeding, into the river.

My fault?

Could this all be my fault?

I did not stab her,

and yet the knife is in my hands

and her body is in the river.

Please take me back to my time.

I do not belong here.

I cannot think. Cannot retaliate

against forces larger than me

wishing me gone.

I think they are winning.

March 26, 1984.

Room 30.

She slept besides me

in a hotel neither of us were supposed to be at.

She seemed afraid

as she slept, like a man was hunting her

in her dreams.

At breakfast, she told me

she needed to run.

I offered

to run with her.

And we drove

towards Milford Reservoir,

hoping we could outrun

God.

He comes in many forms.

Hers different from mine.

Her God followed us there and stabbed her with my hands

as she attacked me with a will that was not her own.

An illness that in my world may have been treated

but here, had no cure.

My God coerced me to drag her body

under the cedar tree.

Where she sat

as if resting.

The world would never know

what she'd done

or almost done.

And hopefully would never know what I'd done.

Send me back, please.

I cannot keep taking photos of this.

Cannot keep chronicling the side effects

of a time-traveler's disease.

March 31, 1984.

Las Vegas with a stop in Durango

The end of a month and the end of a life.

This should be

the end of my journey, too.

We made it out of Colorado, only to

vanish amid the highs and lows of Utah.

A mediocre place to end a mediocre life.

She was only 18.

I couldn't have done that.

Surely someone placed

these weapons in my hands

as a cruel joke.

Surely someone slathered her

in stage blood,

and not lamb's blood,

a lamb to the slaughter.

I have to get back to the present. The future?

Which one is it now?

I cannot tell.

No one is responding

to my texts.

Still, I send my photos,

still-frames of mutilated bodies

propelled by some uncontrollable force

of duty,

loyalty to the vultures

that sent me here

to bring them back

fresh carrion.

April 1, 1984.

This one, they won't identify right away.

I feel as though

I'm not

the only one here.

I could've sworn I saw

someone else taking a photo

of me.

I am being watched.

fleeing towards SoCal

in someone else's car.

Their 17 year old daughter is in the back seat.

I let her off

at a rest stop.

Yet again,

history has been altered.

I watch her

decay,

watch her identifying features

melt.

This one, they won't identify right away.

April 4, 1984.

A second phone like mine.

My watcher; another like me.

She is only 16.

Tina Marie.

She tells me she's

going crazy.

Her phone holds the only evidence

of my existence on this plane.

I snap her photo in return and wonder

who my competition is.

I am not the only one

being sent to observe.

Who else

is here with me,

out of place,

out of

time?

She's coming with me.

I cannot afford to let her

run.

April 10, 1984.

She tells me she's going crazy.

When she said crazy

I didn't think it would come to this.

She dragged this child into my car and told me she needed to die.

I told her I couldn't.

She told me I would,

and I found

she was right.

I would.

Hell, maybe we're both

a little crazy.

Maybe that's what time travel does.

She tells me to check on the body.

There is nothing there.

A space where a sixteen year old bleeding girl

used to be.

And the seventeen year old girl beside me

is pissed.

She floors it.

A mall I shouldn't recognize looms ahead

and the next thing I know there's a new woman in the car

and I'm driving.

Tina follows behind,

in a stolen Pontiac Firebird.

Gotta get the hell outta

Dodge.

And when the woman next to me

begins to die, a mass of bleeding flesh and agony,

I stop driving and dump her, still bleeding

into a gravel pit.

Wasn't it Muhammad Ali who said

"It isn't the mountains ahead to climb

that wear you out;

it's the pebble in your shoe.”

This woman has worn me out

and she is with

the pebbles now.

Send me home,

I beg.

Something evil

is coming.

And the crazy girl buys a ticket to LA.

I don't bother

to stop her.

April 13, 1984.

Where's the quickest route to Canada?

What happens when you die?

I wish I would've known the answer

before now

when I'm

dying.

Is this where i end?

Alone in a timeline under a false name

accused of murders that I

didn't

commit.

I didn't.

I didn't.

What does it mean to die

before you were born?

It hurts

just as much

as dying in the present.

Maybe more, but

how should i know?

I've never died

before.

I've sent my photos,

evidence of a timeline unwoven,

and I,

the spider at its center

being eaten by the fly.

backwards-upside-down-right-and-left

all directions at once

and then motion

ceases.

My real name will be

forgotten.

Now the world will only know me

as Christopher Bernard Wilder.

The man I never was, but now I am

and will always be.