I had the world and watched it pass me by.
And how it happened I have no idea…I’m just left here wondering why
You got on a jet plane…flew a million miles away and even when I’m close to you
it seems like we’re so far away.
And now it seems you found another man…who wants hold your hand
And while I drink myself to sleep the way I do every night
You should know I still think of you as I grab my pillow and hold it tight
I sometimes imagine that that pillows you and that everything we had is still so very, very true. But I know, oh I know.
I know so very well in the back of my head. I know what’s really going on and while I still miss you so…I hope you understand…that when you walk past and see my smiling bright that it is all just a front ‘cause in the back of my mind you know I don’t feel right
I still miss you so and imagine you’ll come back, oh come back
We could catch a plane and get this thing back on track. We could make it right on a second chance. But I know I don’t have a chance, oh I know.
But all I have is this pen, some rhymes and a love song
It’s the only thing that keeps my holding on…it’s the only thing that keeps me strong
Cause I still miss you so, oh I know, oh I know.
Jacob’s head lay cradled in his arms folded on the desk in front of a pile of open books stacked on top of each other. Papers scattered across the floor like feathers from the wind from the fan blowing them back and fourth. The computer hissed from being kept on for so long.
On the opposite edge of the dingy basement, a six foot tall pod made out of aluminum with wires running like tentacles down its side down to the floor and back up again to a steel box with the a clock and two lights on it that sat on a wooden table. The machine’s door was open and on the inside shiny metal glistened from the light bulb tangling from the ceiling in the middle of the basement.
A fly buzzed around the machine and the piece of cold chicken and an open can of Pepsi near the box. Nothing else could be heard in the house as the twilight started to break and appear in the window well that had long grass and weeds growing in the gravel on the outside of the well.
Jacob’s hands were bandaged and you could see scars running up his arms if you looked close enough. His fingernails, blackened and cracked, dug into the table as he moved his head from one side to the other appearing to awake. But his head rested again and he started to snore.
Two years ago, he took a ride to the junkyard to buy the aluminum for the machine’s core. He graduated from M.I.T. ten years ago with a degree in advanced astrophysics; his senior these was on the theoretical possibilities of time travel if one could find or create a wormhole in order to use the elasticity of space to travel backwards at light speed to any destination and to change history. He received a C, the lowest grade he had ever received.
M.I.T or California with Rachael, Jacob thought? He pressed down the accelerator with his right foot and raced down I-95, hitting 100 mph. The highway went on for miles and the twilight broke the complete black of the early morning hours as the piercing stars faded into blue skies.
“Jacob you should come with me.”
“But this might be my only chance at M.I.T.”
“This might be your only chance for a new life.”
“Boston is new.”
“So is California.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“I don’t know.”
“Rachael,” Jacob screamed, his head darting up from his arms.
Rubbing his eyes with closed fists, Jacob yawned and then picked up the screwdriver on the table and walked over to the box. He unscrewed four screws at its base and slid the cover off it and picked up a soldering iron that he had plugged in the night before and fused a piece of wire to a circuit board.
Decisions factor into your life like algebra. One wrong one can ruin an entire equation. But unlike math, you can’t just go back and erase the mistakes—they stay with you forever and no eraser can wipe away the stains. Unless, of course, you alter time and correct the things you’d do differently. But time travel is just an illusion for those who hold onto regret like a pillow at night when you’re all by yourself.
Jacob trudged up the steps past boxes filled with circuitry, wires, yellowing books, and pictures—that had long since faded, just not from memory. In the kitchen, he removed a can of coffee from the cupboard and started scooping the Columbian coffee into the percolator. Who needs sleep when you have coffee?
Jacob had long since left the hospital. He almost died that day he realized the nun was but an hallucination. Somehow, by some miracle, the thought of something better—hope—kept him alive. That was years and years ago.
The problem was that when he left the hospice and moved on he did meet someone and then was forced to make the choice. Now, years later, regret filled him like a heart devoid of blood. For whatever reason, he didn’t try to look Rachael up. He didn’t think that maybe, just maybe, she missed him too. That at this very moment she too might be looking for him. That she might too dream about him every night.
It really didn’t matter since he cloistered himself in the house after he won the award. He received $10 million dollars from a wealthy philanthropist after having discovered the elusive “God Particle” at the Long Hadron Collider in CERN near Geneva. The universe opened up to the world after that but Jacob closed down. He often wondered what she thought. She must’ve heard. It was all over the news. But that wouldn’t change the fact that he did what he did.
He didn’t like the fact that she wouldn’t go with him to Boston; she didn’t like the fact he wouldn’t go to CalTech instead and follow her to California. Something like that…it ruined things.
“God damnit, work.” He yelled at the machine which was really more of a pipe dream. In the back of his head he knew it would never work. How could he possibly bend time with scraps of uranium plated alloy? He could anyone bend time at all. It was all theory to him. He knew that time moved forward at an unstoppable pace and that even the present would become the past in a second. And the future would become the present and then the past. But going back? not possible.
He picked up the box on the table and smashed it just like all his dreams. He then threw the pieces at all the books by Bourn, Visser and Hawking. Then he collapsed on the floor, his head prostrate on the ground, and cried.
For someone like Jacob losing wasn’t easy. Ever since his battle with cancer and his subsequent victory he felt invincible. And he thought that when he made the decision to let her walk away and never ask her to stay, he’d be okay. But, he didn’t realize at the time how much he needed her.
And now as he lay on the floor he hoped against hope that he could find her. That he could call her. That she would want him. But that was years ago even if it felt like yesterday to him. He picked up the box and started rebuilding the machine.
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