This was my story.
Time Machine
by Jeff Arce/Jarce ArtThor
Jeff
doesn’t know much about science, or quantum physics, the theory of relativity,
nor how to bend space and time in any which way. He did not need to know all of
that, however, because Jeff has a box. It is no ordinary box, though: it’s a
Time Machine.
Jeff knows
markers, and colored pencils. He knows how to spill hours of his life onto a
canvas. He knows how to get himself blissfully lost in the unending forest of
creation. That was all the raw knowledge he needed to achieve the
impossible.
Time rolls
on like an unstoppable runaway train. But his artwork somehow captures it all,
even when that was never to be its intended message. Every stroke of his pen
inscribes moments of the past on paper.
He forgot
all about the box, busying himself with life. He always lost that treasure
chest in the jungle of his mind as the book of life turns and turns. Depression
was his compass to guide him back to it. When there seems to be no good cause
or purpose, when he was at his darkest of moments, some secret door opens and a
terrible path is drawn in harsh light. In a gasp of sudden revelation, he
remembers.
A strange
hunger for the past steals all of his senses. He hurries to the closet. He
tosses aside a mountain of clothing he hasn’t worn in ages. He doesn’t really
know why he still keeps those rags, but he doesn’t care. He only wants the Time
Machine. It is still there, underneath it all, buried like hopes and
dreams—like all dead things. With delicate hands he pulls the relic free from
its grave, like some coveted fossil unearthed at last. It is nothing more than
an old shoebox, wrapped in fraying packing tape. He never dares to break the
seal completely, as if doing so would spoil its sacred contents. He gently
peels back the withering cardboard lid, and reaches inside.
The machine
is instantly activated.
He draws
from the box an old illustration he had once cherished with insatiable passion.
It lay all these years dormant in its tomb, but still it has preserved so many wistful
memories. Jeff smiles at it in his hands, but it’s a sad smile. He is suddenly
transported to when he first set his pencil to paper, bringing this wild vision
possessing his mind to life. He was swept away to a time when he carried that
drawing with him from one life Event to the next. He lugged that art tablet
with him under his arm all the way until his graduation, and even still when he
met the woman that would eventually become his wife.
She left
him. And that poisoned Jeff from inside, sending him reeling into an implacable
dark cove of depression.
He needed
an escape. If only for a moment, he needed to retreat back to a time when
everything was better. Before the pain, before the loss—before her. But she was
always there. Like an addict he starved for the past, knowing exactly where it
led. He gazed longingly at his work, not really seeing it, only the events that
spawned around it. The technique he had applied in this piece was callow. He
had learned so much since those days. But that didn’t matter. It was useless.
What was in
the illustration was never so important as what was attached to it. With
immortal Time indelibly etched into every imperfect scrawl of the pen, he sat
there on his hoard of forgotten possessions and fell deep into the box, it’s
emptiness filling him up.
He wished
he could stay there and never leave again. Yesterday he would have a mind to
know better than all that. Today he wasn’t quite sure about tomorrow. Oblivion
is a state of mind, and in his Time Machine all that is now was obsolete.
Forever trapped in what might have been and what once was is where he dies. In
the Time Machine his soul rots away.
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