The Paradox

When I was a child, I remember feeling lonely. I grew up without a father, my mother worked long hours during the week, and I didn’t get along well with other kids… I guess they always felt like there was something off about me. Maybe that was because I spent a lot of time at the hospital when I was really young. When my mother and I would spend time together, she would grill me about how I felt and what I’d been doing all day, and sometimes she would tell me stories about my father, but I can’t be sure how much of that was made up. Sometimes it seems like she never really knew him at all, other times he seems like a character out of a book.

I fell in love with science fiction when I was around eight, after an older boy introduced me to a show called The Outer Limits… after that I found The Twilight Zone, Andromeda, Star Trek, The Matrix, and anything I could find on the internet. The older boy showed me how to get around the parental controls on my phone… apparently mom had an unlimited data plan, so I could keep myself entertain when she was too busy… also we didn’t have a tv or computer, so the phones were pretty much our only connection to the wider world, she always said. So, I watched my shows, and talked about them with my one friend in the world, an older boy named A… which I always thought was a strange name, like his parents just gave up and couldn’t even bother to pick a random letter from the alphabet, so they just went for the first one. Oh yeah, my name is Anthony, by the way.

Mom didn’t have many friends either, and even though she worked in a hospital, she never really seemed like she liked other people much, not enough to let them close to us. She seemed to take to A however, though she decided she’d call him Adam. Maybe it was because we looked so much alike, or maybe it was something else, some maternal instinct. When he started hanging around, was about the time mom started letting me stay home, instead of waiting around the hospital. He ate at our house a lot, and she would give him some money for looking after me when she wasn’t around. Apparently, his mom worked late too.

I was twelve, when I learned the truth… it wasn’t that me and Adam resembled each other, it was that we were the same person. see, one day I felt strange, a sensation, a pull… Adam told me I needed to go back, back to where we met, back to the past. He said it was time, and that father had told him if I didn’t go it would be as if he never existed… he said he could feel this as well, as if he was slipping away. He said it was the same for him when he had been on my side, he knew I was scared, but it was okay. I didn’t go back though, I wanted to know more about father, about what he was talking about, I was always more of an observer than a doer… think first act later, that was my way back then. I didn’t feel scared, so much as I felt unprepared, I couldn’t go back without more information. He didn’t satisfy my need to know, maybe because he was a little bit scared of not existing, maybe because he assumed I already knew things, things I didn’t know, I don’t know… but I imagine it can get a little confusing trying to explain things to a very young version of yourself, moments before you cease to be.

Suddenly it was as if he never existed… mom had always given me some cash, in case I wanted to order pizza or something. She worried about my talking to myself about this and that, as if I had been talking to an imaginary friend, but otherwise she felt like I was a very competent child, able to look after myself when necessary. But I remembered everything the way it had been, even thought it had not been the way I remembered it, according to anyone else who would know differently. It seemed I had summoned myself from the future, and that the future me had known something about dad. I wanted to know more, I wanted to know how such a thing was possible and if I could do it again. I tried to work it out for a time, but at some point, I simply didn’t want to be alone anymore, I wanted someone like me to just show up and be there… and then it happened. There I was, no more than an hour from that moment, I was right there standing in front of myself. I let myself disappear again, then I tried imagining talking to myself a day from now, today. There I was again. This time, I decided I would go back, I would complete the loop… so I did, and afterwards… after I watched the loop be completed again, I continued forwards, a day older than I had been, than I otherwise should be, but otherwise the same, unaffected.

It wouldn’t be long before I would eventually meet my father, though in a way, I already met him, I already knew him very well. Still, there were many things he would help me to understand… about time travel, about what I was, who I was, and why I could do the things I could do. He would explain what it meant for me to exist, for me to be a Paradox… a natural born time-traveler. But that is a story, for another time.