If you found out that time was liquid and has been changed!
What would you do? Would you tell others?
Time is a funny part of us, you see. Everyone uses it, everyone knows it, and everyone loses a bit of it constantly. You wake up, you go to sleep, and somewhere in between, you misplaced a few hours you swear you never spent. Most people laugh that off and call it living. I call it a leak in something we do not understand.
Now here is the part that gets me. What if you could change just one of the three? Use it, know it, or lose it. Most would say lose it. Take away the cost, keep the benefit. That sounds like a deal a smart man would take. But I am not most, and I have learned that when something sounds simple, it is usually hiding something that will bite you later.
This is not a theory piece. This is a record. Because something changed, and I am the only one who knows it did.
I woke up like any other day. No noise, no dream that stuck, no feeling of dread or anything crawling up my spine. Just a normal morning where the coffee tastes the same, and the world looks like it agreed to keep going without asking. That was the problem; it felt normal, but deep down, I felt something was wrong that morning. You learn after a while that normal isn't something you can trust, and with what I deal with day after day, I look at everything and check twice.
So I went through my routine as I do every morning, then I looked at my notes. I had a feeling I still do not know why, but I needed to look at my past writings, the cases I keep stacked in the box under the bed, still in a way that only I understand. You would think I was messy, but I can tell you where anything is in under ten seconds, and that has saved my life more than once. Except this time it did not. Because something was missing. Now, I do not mean a page was gone or a file got misplaced. I mean a whole thought, a full piece of work, something I remembered writing in detail, with names, locations, and an ending I did not like. Gone. Not torn out. Not erased. Gone in the way that makes no sense at all, because everything around it was still there, like it never had a reason to exist. I sat there for a long time, just thinking, why? Staring at a space where something should have been. And then words from the past came back to me that were said by a wizard or warlock who said: “You are special or something, either way, that gives you the rights of the underworld as well as of the living world, Karl.” I could remember the ending of what I wrote. So I knew what the story was, what the person left behind said to me while in tears. And I knew he lost everything. Not in a slow way, not over time, in a moment. Clean and final in just a blink, his life was over for him, and he was broken. The kind of ending you write down because you do not want to forget it later. Except later is now, and it never happened? I checked everything I could. Records, news, my own notes, even places I do not like going back to because they remind me of things I would rather not revisit. There was nothing. Not even a hint that this event had ever taken place. Which means one of two things. Either I lost my mind, which I have considered more than once, or something removed that moment from time itself. I know that might sound incredible, however, if you are on this story, you already know I live in a place most would say is impossible to be, so it's just another day to me. Now, if you are still reading this, you already know which one I chose. Because I went looking for him. Not a ghost. Not a name on a page. A man who should have been broken beyond repair. That is where this stops being a thought and starts being a problem. Because I found him, and there was no man like I clearly remember, there was more, much more than I thought could and should be, so much more.
Not barely holding on. Not damaged. Whole. Living in the same house I remembered writing about, with the same layout, the same road leading up to it, even the same broken step on the porch that I noticed when I tripped the first and second visits here to this very now clean and whole home. You see this home? The last time I was here, it was mostly burnt down, and there was nothing but a man sitting on these steps, trying to survive another minute, needing to tell me his real story so the world would know what happened here.
Now, however, no tragedy, no loss, no burnt home, and no reason for me to be there at all. So I knocked on the nice, clean door and waited for a response. He answered the door like nothing had ever happened. And behind him, I could see what should not have been possible. His family. All of them, Alive, Moving, Laughing. The kind of normal you do not question unless you already know it is wrong, and have a memory of what should have been. He looked at me like I was just another person knocking on his door, maybe a salesman, maybe someone lost, maybe someone he would forget five minutes after I left. So I stood there, holding on to a memory that no longer belonged to the current version of the world.
So I asked him the only question that made any sense to me, and the question I knew would not be received well if there was a true answer, “Do you remember losing them?” He paused, not long, just enough. And that was all I needed. Because people do not pause on things that never happened, they pause on things they are trying not to remember or want to forget. He looked past me for a second, then back at me, and said, “No. I think you have the wrong house.” That was the moment, not what he said, what he did not say, no confusion, no anger, no correction.
Just denial, clean, and might even have been practiced for an event just like this one. And that is when I knew this was not about time being lost, this was about time being changed and a special event being erased from almost everyone's minds, but why not me? Sometimes I wish I did not have this, whatever this is, and I could just walk away like most did, not knowing or caring. But I could feel someone else around me, as if they were making my hair rise to protect me; however, I could not see anyone else. I knew there was another around us, I will even go as far as to say that it knew what happened here. I did leave that day and walked away. I did not know why it felt right that I needed to go immediately, but it was a strong pull to even run to my car and speed away to never return.