If you found yourself non-consensually sent back in time, how would you get back to the present???
It started off as just another back in my hometown-style nightmare, but something wasn’t quite right about it this time. The more I wandered about trying to get back to Florida, the more I remembered about this alternate life of mine until I realized that I hadn’t just failed and wound up back home … instead, something very different was taking place…
The timeframe itself was a bit sketchy – Mom and Dad were still together, but clearly on the brink of divorce, and I was fighting with my sister a lot, but I also had these feelings like I just didn’t fit in and this wasn’t my time, and eventually I started to remember more about significant things in my life such as buying a house and having a wife and a decent job, and that’s when I began to fight harder to get them back.
Packing to leave was much different than before – after a fight with my Dad, I simply told him to join me for dinner the next day if he liked because the day after I would be moving back to Florida. I think the only things that ended up in my car were a laptop, some clothes, and an acoustic guitar because now I had the foresight that the other things that packed my car previously weren’t really needed anyways.
I was to head to Tampa Saturday morning by way of New York to try and hunt down my future wife. I didn’t really know what to expect – would she be back in New York as well or still in Tampa where I had left her? Worse yet, if I did find her in a state where we hadn’t even met yet, how would I convince her that I was her future husband and not just some crazy stalker person with insane amounts of information about her???
I walked through meeting her in my head the entire trip, picking nuggets of information about her and her family that no one else knew, as well as insight into our relationship together in the future, and how one day we would elope a year before our actual wedding, and how we would struggle for years before being able to have our first child. I still couldn’t imagine what her reaction would be to a stranger sitting across the table from her, able to recite her social security number and every medical procedure she’s ever had and her closeness with her grandmother … I was terrified but also determined.
The future that I once knew seemed so familiar, yet so far away … how does one get back to something you once took for granted?