Time travel was more serious than he’d thought it would be. Mostly because everything he knew about the past had come from contemporary entertainment media.
On arriving in the past, the first thing he’d noticed was that fashions were not like he’d thought they’d be from everything he’d seen on TV. And the way people talked was different too. The way people had looked at him when he’d tried to ask for directions had made his skin crawl with self-consciousness. It felt as though he were an alien visiting from a far away planet.
And when he’d used the phone at the motel… The bill had left him cringing. Because while it wasn’t a lot of money, it had taken a big chunk out of the money he had on hand. It wasn’t like he’d been able to get a hold of a lot of old fashioned money before he’d traveled back in time.
Even the size of the bills was different from modern money!
He hadn’t realized that phone calls charged per minute, and that $0.10 a minute really added up when he was trying to get complex concepts across to someone on the other side of the country while using a scratchy line that kept cutting in and out. He’d had to repeat himself so many times that he’d worried he’d lose his voice.
When he’d time traveled, he’d thought it was going to be easy.
Sure, there was no Internet or GPS and finding people or places involved using phonebooks, but he’d been confident in his ability to handle things. But once he was in the past, nothing was as easy as he’d thought it would be.
There were phone booths, but using them involved carrying around a pocketful of dimes. And when he’d stepped into his first one across the street from the bus station, he’d been surprised by how filthy it was. Putting the handset against his ear had quickly taught him to always wipe off phonebooth handsets before using them. He still cringed away from the memory of other peoples’ ear grease touching his skin.
And the cars.
Every single one released a cloud of exhaust that wreaked havoc with his asthma.
He’d been surprised on first seeing the sky during the day. There was a perpetual haze that left everything with a creepy orange hue that made him think of that old crank conspiracy about the sun being replaced.
He’d never experienced so much air pollution in his life. The air quality outside was terrible, and whenever he went into a public place the air was thick with clouds of cigarette smoke, to the point that his first visit to a diner had left him horrified by the reek and he hated the way the smell clung to his hair, skin, and clothes. He didn’t think his lungs were ever going to fully recover.
But at least he had completed his mission.
It was with a sense of relief that he returned to his own time. Where the sun was bright, the sky was clear, and he could draw in a deep breath without instantly feeling as though he were going to die from the pollution.
He cradled his smartphone against his chest and promised to never let it go.
Because while the future had its own difficulties to deal with, the past was not the utopia he’d fantasized it would be. TV and movies had lied to him. Or maybe he’d lied to himself by not learning about the little details about the past, the things they never focused on in time travel stories. The casual miseries that people back then were so used to that they didn’t even notice.
Starting at $0.10 a minute and stretching to encompass the horribly pervasive cigarette smell that was everywhere, giving the walls and the sky a yellowish tint that couldn’t be washed away no matter how hard he scrubbed his skin. He no longer fantasized about traveling back in time to make a fabulous life for himself. Instead, he was grateful he was born in the future where a loaf of bread cost more money, but where he could order anything he wanted online and have it delivered direct to his door.
Time travel was more serious than he’d thought it would be, but it had taught him to appreciate the moment he was in. Because the past was never as good as someone remembered it to be, and the future was never as bad as someone imagined it would be. It was the contemporary moments that mattered because they never lasted.
Time was always moving. And at $0.10 a minute, the bill would always add up, and would always need to be paid. So why not enjoy the moment he was in. The Now that would someday be looked back on as a Then.
=END=
~Harper Kingsley
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