Time Travel

Casinos have no windows, causing people to lose all consensus of time. You enter at noon and exit early the next morning with only feeling as if three hours had passed when in all actuality twelve had soared by. Can we call that Time Travel?

When an equestrian is on horseback there are four phenomenal seconds when all four hooves are not touching the ground. Time is known to stop in those seconds. Is that time travel?

What is the basis of time travel?

Is losing sense of time, time travel?

A girl who sits in a dusty room, toys from a long forgotten lifetime she hadn't frequented in many decades were strewn about the room, button missing from one of her floppy eared dog toys. She rubbed the gold chain bracelet that wrapped around her wrist. The shock of electromagnetic waves that surged through the thin air flowed through her bracelet, shocking her soft skin. She would not have much time left here to look about her lost things. As she moved to finger the ear of the dog on the dust mote ridden floor her body was yanked through a hole unbeknownst to human eyes. Fusions of blue, white, silver, and purple wound together to form a bright spectrum that encased her body. Her hair whipped about her face as she caught her breath and a hand met her cheek.

"More and more beautiful every day..."

He was someone she knew well, a smell she knew well. A smile she knew well. This man with his broad rough hands cupping her soft cheeks brought tears to her eyes. Smile infectious and aura bright, she leaned into the touch and listened to the voice of a man she'd known through so many of her jumps.

Shock.

Her heart plummeted and hands were ripped away. She was abruptly robbed of his touch.

The sun shone brightly on the clustered street. Houses almost sat on top of one another but she immediately recognized the area. A red house, kids outside enjoying life. She glanced down at herself and she was much shorter, thicker, and still full of adolescence. Her foot lifted to take a step that she never got before a black undecorated BMX bike skidded to a halt in front of her. There he was again, smiling that same smile and filling her with light.

"You leaving-"

Shock.

Fields of Sunflowers taller than she rose to meet the morning sky. As far as she could see, there were bright yellow and orange hued flowers. She admired their purpose. Beauty, peaceful beauty. It was undisturbed by society, or fickle things like time. They just wrapped around her like warmth on a cool day. Her fingers brushed pollen dusted petals before again she was whisked away.

This was her punishment. After eighteen years of a normal life, her grandmother on her deathbed handed her a bracelet of bright gold. At the time she had no idea that once on, the bracelet would never come off until she were on HER deathabed. It was a cruel gift, but one her grandmother thought she would appreciate.

And it wasn't that she did not appreciate it, but she saw the world through seconds of time, some segments of memory and history longer than others. She never got to stay and progress. She has lost all consensus of time. She knows not what it is and curses it for the moments it takes her back to the man she loved. Through her jumps of time she would sometimes appear in moments she'd rather not have been a part of.

She'd had no pets, no children, just lovers she left in the night as her body carried her places the men in her bed could not go.

At the age of sixty, when wrinkles set in where youth had been prominent and grey hair replaced black, she watched her childhood love never forgotten, she watched her brothers children have their own. She watched cities rise and fall on the coming centuries. She watched King Arthur pull Excalibur from the cold stone. She wore whale bone lined corsets that crushed your ribs. She'd seen cars fly, and cities float on air. She watched the moon shatter into a million pieces. She watched the love of her life start a family.

She knew everything to happen before it happened and that was her gift along with her curse. In hindsight she'd accepted the loss of her own future and decided to live through the moments of the people she got to see. The moments where future didn't matter, a moment where future was not already set in stone. For many years she lived in her many selves. She safeguarded every hug, kiss, and tender moment she lived through.

Finally as she lay in a hospital bed, her heart rate monitor beeping slowly she smiled sweetly up at the ceiling and praised the fact that she'd stayed in one place for more than a couple of hours. Her body could no longer handle the distance.

But as she lay there, saddened by the fact that she had no children of her own to mourn her, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened them once again she was standing in that field of sunflowers she'd visited twenty years ago. The sun was warm on her skin and as she walked ever slowly through that field a hand found hers. It gripped hers with a kindness. Turning to see the boy she'd known throughout his entire life, on that BMX bike, gripping her cheeks, smiling sweetly at a baby, celebrating the family he'd made, and carrying her on his back to the store to buy candy late in the afternoon after school, smiled down at her as if they were still 14 years old and wild.

"It's about time..."

His voice was smooth velvet and familiarity.

"How are you here?"

"No lack of time could keep me away in the end."

And as he gripped her hand he became her casino. No windows or clocks, or shocks to the skin. Just a blissful loss of time, something she'd never truly gotten to feel.

As her breathing slowed and the machine attached to her chest slowed to a crawl she stepped into the comfort of his hold and closed her eyes. She may have lost centuries, seen things she could never logically explain, but here and now was finally her time to live in a place where eternity relished no time stamp or leap through colors and light to somewhere she'd never been and never stay long enough to get to know. Finally she was with what that bracelet stole from her so long ago. Finally she was given a future, with no end in sight.