PAST/PRESENTE/FUTURE

In the city, things are about to change.

In the country, lives are about to be turned a full 360.

Yesterday turns into today, and today turns into tomorrow.

At least, that’s how we pictured it.

Everywhere in the universe, there are tales about these wondrous, amazing love stories. These stories defy everything we’ve been taught, and everything we know as real. We think of love as a kind of dream, a fantasy to reality. Sometimes that’s reasonable, because some of us don’t know how to love properly.

Maybe that isn’t true though. Maybe it’s only since we place love so closely to dreams, we don’t know how to use our love to its full potential.

Or maybe it’s because we naturally haven’t found the ones we were supposed to love yet. The subject we’ve named time can forbid love, should complications arise.

XX

Sarah of Sussex was born in the 10th century, but the date of her death has and always will be unknown. She was born into a family of three older siblings, a father. Her mother died giving birth to her.

Sarah was betrothed to the blacksmith of Sussex at the time, but that did not happen. She disappeared right after she’d reached of age, and was never seen again.

That is all that is known about Sarah of Sussex.

This isn’t because she wasn’t interesting, or a bad woman. It was simply because she vanished off the face of that earth, and ended up on that same earth later.

Much later.

XX

Daniel hasn’t been born yet. In fact, he won’t be born until the current population is long dead. Technically, he won’t even live where the current population lives. That world is a vast land of death.

Daniel will live in the ‘Cosmos’, as scientists say, with the family he wasn’t born into, but placed into. They do not live on the earth of old times, but the earth of many other places, where one can live without dying of radiation.

When he reaches the age of seventeen, he will disappear as well. He will return one day, but only when his ‘family’ embarks on a mission to find him.

That will happen before he is born, but after he has vanished.

Stolen into the present.

Imagine that tomorrow never came, or that we never had a past. What would we think of ourselves? Problems between races, classes, and sexes would never have arisen, because we’d never have enough time to dwell on it.

How would we live without knowing time lasted forever? Would we have family or friends? Or…would we have enough time to make them? Consider this; if we didn’t know about time, who’s to say that time couldn’t stop at the end of every day and never start again? What would happen? Would we freeze in space and never live again?

If time started all of a sudden, how would we react? And if it stopped, what would it stop on? Destruction, peace, or something else?

What if we didn’t know? Can we even imagine a world without it?

XX

Sarah went to sleep one night and never woke up. Or at least, that’s how she felt. She slept, and she slept, and she slept. She thought it was kind of curious that the sun never rose to shine, but sleep was precious to her. It let her mind wander.

Being too young to be confined to one type of thought, Sarah didn’t let her wakelessness bother her. She continued to sleep forever.

However, one day she did wake up. At first she thought she was still dreaming, but sure enough, she was finally awake.

She woke up to early morning light pouring in from a nearby window, nestled under a few blankets. She thought nothing strange with any of this until she sat up and noticed that she was not in her home with her siblings and her father.

In fact, she was nowhere that she could identify. The strange walls in this room were dyed a stark white, contrasting against her memory of the wooden walls of her own home. The window was familiar enough, but an odd rectangular cover was covering it up. There was even a door, no matter how peculiar it seemed-at least it was a door, which led her to believe she was in a home of some kind.

She rustled about in her unfamiliar bed and gasped in surprise at what she was wearing. She was not in the nightgown she had worn to sleep. No, she was in the most exotic clothing she’d ever seen. The top looked like a shirt, but there were not buttons or tails, only stretchy material. The bottoms were surely pants, but they had no buttons either. Just a drawstring to hold the pants up, which she had only seen her brothers wear before.

Nothing came to mind as to why she was there. It never even occurred to her that she might be away from her village. Maybe she’d passed out in the woods nearby? She’d done it before, so it was a likely explanation.

Sarah accepted this logic and got out of her bed, every detail in the room permeating through her mind. There was nothing real special in the room; a bed, a dresser, a mirror, and a funny looking vase on a side table. It was only strange in her opinion because it had a cover. Maybe it was supposed to hold a candle.

She didn’t know, and she had no desire to find out, either.

Searching for the dress that she had worn almost every day of the year, Sarah found nothing like it. She found more shirts like the one she had on, and more pants except they were stiffer and dyed blue. She didn’t find the shirts or the pants attractive in the slightest, so she decided she would have to do with what she had on; at least they were comfortable.

Gathering up her courage, Sarah padded across the wooden parquet floor and twisted the oddly shaped metal doorknob, opening up to the world beyond.

Her village was not what she found, however. She opened up the door to blinding morning light stretching across a flat grey surface like a fancy street and grass-greener grass than she’d ever seen in her life.

Shady trees towered over the door, giving Sarah the impression that she’d been taken to a wealthy duke or lord’s house. At least, that was what she hoped.

Suddenly, across the grey fancy street a fast-moving carriage flew by, a roaring sound following in its wake.

Sarah would have screamed, but she didn’t know if that would be the proper reaction for this place.

This was absolutely strange to her; there was nothing around that was familiar or friendly, or even normal.

She had no idea how she had gotten there, either.