Chapter 2
I’ve heard time described in a lot of ways. I’ve heard that time is a river that can’t be dammed. I’ve heard that time is a soldier marching on. No one ever wants to consider that the true descriptions depict what time does to humanity. In that case, time is a taskmaster and aging is the whip, or time is the foot soldier of death. No one likes to talk about that because it’s a harsh reality. They would rather couch it in warm and cozy metaphors that have no teeth because they don’t relate directly to anyone. I’ve seen too much of time’s dark underbelly to treat it like a house cat when it’s really a rabid lion. But I do wish, just once, that it would behave for me like it does for everyone else.
****
Infatuation might well be the reason that there are so many love songs. I’ve always been a bit of an old soul, or maybe just a cynical soul, but even my heart has the ability to dance to the beat of love. See, there I go, getting all poetic on you. She still has the power to do that to me.
Her name was Tara. I don’t know why I said was, I meant is. Her name is Tara. Maybe you can remember a moment like the first time I saw her, the kind that could have been ripped right out of a rom-com. It was a Saturday. The air was just hitting that perfect crisp, cool temperature that marks the height of fall. I can imagine the autumn breeze, marred by the scent of nacho cheese and beer that day, just like every other game day. I sat in the middle of the Ohio State Horseshoe stadium, invisible among the masses of screaming fans. I had no real team spirit, especially considering the encounter that I had had with that freshman linebacker during orientation, but if you’re not at least a casual fan of the Buckeyes, you’re not accepted at Ohio State.
So, I was fulfilling my game attendance requirements when I caught sight of a cute blonde a row or two below me. She had the warmest blue eyes that I had ever seen, noticeable even at a distance. Her golden hair perfectly framed a sweet smile that boosted my heart rate quicker than a sprint. Our gazes met as she scanned the crowd over her shoulder, and we exchanged a fleeting smile. To this day, I’m absolutely positive that I grinned like a fool, but there was something about that encounter that was always too precious for my embarrassment to matter. The game went into overtime that day, and I didn’t mind a bit. I had a mission: find out that girl’s name.
I’m not going to lie; I might have stalked her a little bit that afternoon. I didn’t have the nerve to find out her name directly, but I couldn’t just let her vanish into the crowd of faces without some way of tracking her down. Lucky for me, she had a loudmouth friend, the kind that makes you cringe whenever you’re around them. Obnoxious laugh, voice that always seems two levels above ”inside voice;” you know, that kind of friend. She was trying to get the blonde’s attention while she was talking to someone else. Impatient, she shouted mock-seriously, “Tara Alicia Matthews, you listen to me when I’m talking to you!”
Although I’m grateful to her, that girl will forever be the queen of socially awkward yelling. Still, thanks to her, I knew the attractive girl’s name. Tara Matthews. I smiled. As the game ended and we all filed slowly out of the stadium, I struggled to keep her in view, hoping to catch up to her so that I could engage her in some small talk.
But infatuation breeds clumsiness, and just as I was about to squeeze past a rotund upperclassman covered in body paint and come alongside her, the crowd surged and jostled me out of the way. Hot-blooded anger coursed through me. I was going to marry that girl, damn it! Gone was my rationality, my trick of slapping a wall to keep me sane; this was do or die. With a quick intake of breath, I jumped.
This time around, I dodged past “El Gordo” and eased up next to Miss Tara Matthews. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I dimly recognized that I wasn’t suffering extreme agony from the jump, but my attention was completely on Tara. She was even more breathtaking up close. You could practically feel niceness flowing off of her like an aura. Have you ever met someone who can make you feel like a hero or a champion without saying a single word? Tara did that for me, even before I could form the first syllable in the word “hello.” But I did manage to get that hello out eventually.
She turned and smiled at me with the warmth of sunshine.
“Hi!”
“You’re Tara, right?” I realized that came across as creepy, so I quickly explained. “Your friend kinda yelled it earlier. It was hard not to hear.”
She laughed easily, a musical sound that made me weak in the knees.
“Yeah, she’s a bit loud sometimes. What’s your name?”
“Ryan.” We shook hands. “Are you a freshman?”
“Freshwoman, thank you!” She tried to stay deadpan, but gave up and chuckled. “I’m kidding; I’m not that much of a feminist. I just like to see people’s reactions.”
We ended up talking for an hour, walking all over campus in an attempt to avoid going back to our dorms. After my initial nervousness wore off, I settled back into my usual dry wit, pulling out all the stops to hear her laugh. I had no doubt that she would be just as sweet to any other stranger, but that didn’t bother me; just being in her presence brought out the best qualities in me.
After a few weeks of texting and hanging out with mutual friends, I got up the nerve to ask her out and, by some miracle, she said yes. The next weeks were amazing. I didn’t even think about jumping while I was with her. She was happy with me and I would have done anything for her.
Turns out, I did just that.
One month almost to the day after we made it official, I was on my way back from the gym when my phone buzzed. The screen lit up with her number, and I smiled as I brought the phone up to my ear.
“Hey, babe, I was just wishing for you.”
A male voice awkwardly cleared its throat on the other end. I froze in my tracks.
“Is this Ryan?” the mystery man asked.
“Yeah, who is this?”
“I’m Bill Matthews, Tara’s father.”
Oh. I relaxed a little, but the shock still left me tense and edgy.
“Oh, hi! We haven’t met, I’m…“
“Tara’s boyfriend. I know.” His voice was gruff, but it didn’t seem like he was trying to intimidate me. It was as if he was trying to keep himself calm. “Listen, Tara is…Tara’s in the hospital.”
My heart stopped. Bill brokenly filled me in. She had been hit by a drunk driver while walking on the main road to campus. The doctors were doing everything they could, but they weren’t optimistic. As I listened to his voice crack with emotion, my grip tightened on my cell phone until the device creaked quietly under the pressure. Something came roaring up inside of me, an emotion that I can only place as downright refusal. No one, whether he was a drunk driver or God himself, was going to take Tara away from me. Tormented by the chaos in my head, I couldn’t connect my thoughts. I just stood there, shaking with rage, fear, and worry.
If I could just go back and protect her…wait. Those were the thoughts of ordinary men. I could protect her.
I didn’t even bother to hang up before I jumped.
Honestly, I don’t remember landing. I don’t remember racing across campus to the main road. I can’t recall how long it took me to spot her walking or when I saw the swerving truck rapidly gaining on her like a metal demon hell-bent on mayhem. I still remember these things, though: the glaring headlights blinding me as I threw Tara off the road, the dim, drunken expression of the driver just visible through the windshield, and Tara’s scream like a high-pitched confirmation that she was alive and safe. But the last thing I remember about that moment was the impact as the truck ran me over.
Chapter 3
Pain is an interesting phenomenon. Men and women avoid pain like a plague. Doesn’t matter if it’s emotional or physical pain, they still scatter like rats before its boots. But without pain, they would never learn the most valuable lesson of life: Pain is how you know you’re alive. Joy is fleeting; love can be lost; but pain? Pain is constant, an irremovable thorn in your side that life twists on occas
ion to let you know that it hasn’t left you yet. I’ve come to treat the pain as a persistent enemy, rather than something to be feared. No matter what I do, no matter how calloused I become, I still feel pain.
That means I’m still alive.
****
If you’ve ever wondered what getting hit by a truck feels like, let me answer with two questions: One, why would you ever wonder that? Two, have you ever had a sumo wrestler pile-drive you into concrete? It’s like that, multiplied by a factor of five.
The good thing about getting hit by a truck (and I can’t believe that I just said that) is that it doesn’t require much description for others to understand that you’re in pain. That was helpful; no one bothered to ask me how I knew Tara had been in danger.
I spent the next three months healing and another four doing physical therapy back at school. Tara mothered me, visiting often and spending every spare moment that she had with me.
When she was there, I never once regretted what I did. One look into those beautiful eyes and I knew I’d dive in front of another truck if she needed me to. It wasn’t that easy after she’d leave for the day, though; the instant she was out of sight, the pain that her presence had kept at bay lunged out of its cage, tearing at my broken body. Not a day went by when I didn’t long to jump back to that moment and dodge the truck. I wasn’t even sure if I could avoid getting hit, but with the kind of pain that I was in, I couldn’t care less if it was realistic or not. I just wanted to escape.
But, time “heals all” when you don’t mess with it, and I eventually recovered. When I went back to school, I discovered I was something of a celebrity. I wasn’t just Ryan Mitchell anymore. I was Ryan Mitchell, Hero Boyfriend. I thought about whipping up some business cards with that moniker. I enjoyed my newfound popularity, but Tara was my whole world. She kept me grounded and humble, and I felt most like a hero when I was with her. We were closer than ever, so when she started to struggle academically, I thought it was my responsibility to make sure she had every advantage. Let me stress that: every advantage.
Since saving Tara from the accident, I had come to the conclusion that jumping was a tool that was meant to be used. I thought of it like Uncle Ben from Spiderman; you know, a “great power, great responsibility” kind of thing, except the way that I rationalized my choices would have turned Uncle Ben green.
Tara had this one professor that loved to hand out ridiculous tests, the sort that no matter how thoroughly you study, you just can’t answer most of the questions. Her grades were all suffering because of those tests, since she had to put in hours of work just to pass a weekly quiz.
Cue Captain Clock’s heroic entrance.
I decided that my girlfriend shouldn’t suffer at the hands of a petty professor, so when Tara showed me her most recent graded quiz, I memorized the correct answers.
Realizing I hadn’t jumped in a long time, I was nervous, but I was committed to helping my girl. With a deep breath and a flinch of anticipation, I jumped back two days.
I landed in my own dorm room, with my shoulders hunched and my face squeezed together like I was expecting a punch. I popped one eye open and peered around the room hesitantly. I was shocked. Surprisingly, other than the usual pressure, I didn’t feel a thing.
Relieved, and a little giddy at my success, I jogged out of my dorm and over to Tara’s. I knew she studied for those tests about now, and I planned on “helping her study” while feeding her the correct answers. If I did it right, she would never know and I would have a happy girlfriend once again. I knocked on her door.
“Yeah?”
“It’s me.”
She swung the door open, her eyes rimmed with exhaustion, clearly fed up to the hilt with studying.
“Honey, now’s not a good time.”
I held up the notebooks that I had grabbed on my way over.
“I’m just here to help.”
She grinned tiredly and stepped back to let me in. Despite her initial skepticism, I was the perfect study partner. I guided her smoothly to “important facts”, which to the casual observer would seem irrelevant, but then, the casual observer didn’t have my first-hand knowledge of the answers. I was careful to make the answers memorable to her by cracking a joke about them, otherwise she might dismiss them and focus on other things.
After a few hours, I had exhausted my well of secret knowledge, and she was wiped out. I kissed her good night and stepped outside. I took a few steps, then jumped forward to the present, landing just in time to watch an echo evaporate into the time stream. I gotta tell you, I’ve been jumping for 400 years now, and I have never gotten used to echoes. Freaks me out every time.
I wandered over to my desk and found the graded quiz that Tara had given me. A red, circled ninety-four percent smiled up at me like an ink trophy for my good work. I had trouble falling asleep that night. I had relapsed; time travel was back in my blood and I craved more.
My addiction had begun.
Chapter 4
Addiction is powerful. I had always known, but never fully understood, that addicts have a chemical dependency on their poison of choice. I didn’t realize it before, but I had straddled a moral high horse in my ignorance about alcoholics and potheads and political officials. I just assumed that they were dependent because they lacked self-control. Little did I know that their beer, their weed, or their social power were seductresses, luring and courting until they latched their terrible hooks into the victim’s flesh.
Some people argue pointlessly about the most addictive chemical. They say opium, they say nicotine, but they neglect the obvious choice: victory. When you win, the ecstasy courses through your veins and touches your soul in a way that makes you pump your fists in the air and roar like a lion in his prime. You never want to let that feeling go, and the only thing that will keep you on that mountaintop is more victory, more success.
Now imagine that you can always win. Always.
Time-travel is a drug.
****
I wish I could say that I was a high-functioning addict, like an alcoholic businessman who still does his job well. I wish I could say that, but I was raised believing that lying to yourself is just pathetic. I was beyond hooked. I jumped just to watch replays of real-life moments that I enjoyed. I once watched the Buckeyes sink an amazing half-court shot at a basketball game over a dozen times. I relived the day Tara and I spent at Cedarpoint Amusement Park twice. I boosted my own GPA as well as Tara’s. It was amazing. Seriously, I did so much, like this one time--
You know what, I’m gonna stop there. I can guarantee that you’re getting the wrong impression. This is NOT a good story. I bet you’re ignoring me when I say that; you’re probably so caught up in the idea of making your own life perfect that you think I’m nuts for complaining. Look at me! I’m 400 years old! You think you know more about this than me??
Sorry. That was rude. I’m just having a bad year.
Look, if I told you all the things I did, I would never get to the moral of the story. For now, it’s enough for you to know this: I jumped a LOT, and my life was great. Tara and I were great, my grades were great, my social life was great, everything was freaking great. Then it all went to hell.
I spent a ton of time fixing Tara’s problems with school and smoothing out the occasional social drama. To all appearances, the two of us led charmed lives. Everything clicked into place when we needed it to and the rest of the world watched with envy. But you can only live like a god for so long before you fall from grace.
Tara started to notice weird things. I never studied. Ever. Why bother when you can know the answers to any test or know exactly how your teacher will grade your essay? She, on the other hand, was meticulous about her studies and got grades identical to mine. Like the loving girlfriend she was, she dismissed that as my natural intelligence.
Yeah, that’s a good one.
There were other things, too. I was inexplicably good at everything. I always said the right thing at the right time
. I was the life of the party. Amazingly, she had enough faith in me to believe that that, too, was just who I was. But when she started noticing discrepancies in her own life, that’s when she began to question.
All girls have secrets. It’s not a bad thing, just something I learned the hard way. I never imagined that Tara kept a diary. She never told me, and I was under the impression that diaries were something only middle-school girls kept to doodle the name of their crush in. In reality, it was her way of getting her emotions out without hurting anyone, basically a gossip-free way to deal with her bad days. It was a sweet notion, a typical Tara thing to do. She laughed, she cried, and she raged in that little spiral-bound book, and though she didn’t start her entries with “Dear Diary”, she really did tell it everything.
She began to observe strange things about her beloved diary. Frequently, she would read through her old notes and ramblings and she noticed a complete lack of negative events. Not just good things outweighing the bad; this was a totally absence of bad days. A page that she secretly scribbled in class stressing about how badly studying for a quiz went would have a totally different tone than the one that followed, basking in a great grade. Others might be more personal, like one entry that she spent talking about how much she was dreading talking to a female friend who accused her of gossiping, but the next journal held her surprise that the same friend didn’t mention it at all.
Tara didn’t share her concerns with me. I guess she thought they weren’t something I would understand, or maybe she assumed she was making something out of nothing. I just know that after weeks of careful watching, my girl figured out the common denominator: me.
And she thought I was the smart one.
She had no clue that I was jumping. I mean, come on, what reasonable person could leap to that conclusion without questioning their sanity? All she knew was that I was a part of every story in her writing with that strange, out-of-place feeling. Still, despite all her searching, she never would have connected the dots if I hadn’t shot myself in the foot.
The Jump Journal Page 2