An uncertain future.

By Emily, High School Student

So you want to travel back in time? Or to the future? You wish you could change the past? Or better understand what is to come? Take it from someone who knows, you’re better off not knowing. I now am able to fathom that this should have just been let alone but I can’t change the past – I refuse to.

2 months ago…
it was an unseasonably warm autumn day, birds were chirping and a breeze rattle the crisp leaves from the trees. Perhaps I would want to come back after this was over and just sit in these warm surroundings. Yes. You can come back, time travel is within the realms of possibility now since Mr Ethan Zedas invented a pill that will transport you and your physical body back in time. They even come in blueberry flavour although the texture is a little scratchy and tends to sometimes feel like you have swallowed a scorpion. Time travel used to be only for the ridiculously wealthy people but now? Since T-tech invented their own pill, it is available to everyone. Only, unless you pay top dollar the most you can travel back is within a year so no memories from your childhood if you are over the age of 15.
My sister, being the adventurous person she is, messed with that in the hopes that she could send me back as a test subject and figure out if she had recreated the expensive pill. So she sent me back.
And I willingly went.
It was like being dragged across rough concrete and swallowing fire all at the same time. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever make it back but I was to far gone to back out now. And when my feet hit the ground I wasn’t in my past, I wasn’t in any lifetime of mine. Everything was so….different. So terrifyingly different. I walked down the deserted street, plastic bags drifted across the sidewalk. And then out of no where a cat dashed across the path, his eyes like saucepans as he eyed me. It was obvious he hadn’t seen a human face in a while.
I gulped and looked at the pill in my hand, I swallowed nervously. Did I want to stay here? A future which seemed so despicable and uncertain that even the cats were terrified? Or did I want to return home and bury my head in the sand, pretending like what I had just seen wasn’t imminent? I took one last look around me, at the bleak concrete walls, the sky that was the same soft pink of the sunset back home, the plants dry and dying. The houses with smashed glass windows and pot plants that were just pots now.
I shoved the pill into my mouth and gulped it down trying to shake the feeling of uncertainty that came from that bleak future. The burning was all that was left behind in the pills wake as I swallowed, then came that feeling of being stretched and contorted as my body was thrown through time and space.
Then my feet hit the ground. And the world around me morphed into my sisters workshop, I was home and I was safe.