The Jump Journal

by Douglas Corriveau

  With no real evidence and no conclusion to come to, Tara pushed her curiosity to the back of her mind and enjoyed life with me. We lived almost all of freshman year without a care.

  As we wound our second semester to a close in May, she received some exciting news. She had been selected for an exclusive semester program in France the next year, and she decided to surprise me with the news. She’d kept it a secret from me because she wasn’t sure what her chances were, but I already knew. I had helped boost her application with some precision jumping.

  That night, we were goofing off in an open field nearby, enjoying the sunset. It was the perfect end to the day. She hopped onto my back and I gave her a piggyback ride back toward campus, which was walking distance down the road. Pressing her cheek into mine, she whispered in my ear, her warm breath sending pleasant chills up my spine.

  “Guess who got into the semester abroad program.”

  And without thinking, I said: “That’s great, babe! I’m so happy for you! When do you leave for Paris?”

  Her whole body tensed against my back, and I had the worst, gut-wrenching intuition that I had just made a terrible mistake. She pulled her head away from mine.

  “Ryan, how did you know it was France?” she asked in a strange, cold voice that I had never heard her use before.

  “You must have said it earlier, Hon.”

  Her hair tickled the back of my neck as she shook her head vehemently.

  “No, I didn’t tell anyone, not my friends, not my parents, not even you. Tell me the truth; how did you know it was France?”

  I was in a serious bind here. For once, I hadn’t foreseen a problem, and I had become accustomed to knowing exactly how everything played out all the time. My mind raced as I considered my options. I could try to lie my way out of it, but I loved her too much for that, and even if I tried, I doubted she would believe me. I could tell her everything, but she’d think I was lying, or worse, that I was crazy. Or…..I could jump. Jumping had fixed everything else in my life, why not this too? So I did. I had forgotten something crucial, though.

  She was on my back.

  Chapter 5

  I knew right away that something was off. I was familiar enough with jumping by now to know when something was wrong, and this pain was certainly different. The bending, twisting, grinding feelings of the darkness were magnified, yet they didn’t feel the same. The pain didn’t invade my body as intensely as it normally did. It seemed deflected somehow, as if I was being shielded. In typical fashion, my senses went from mute to overload in an explosion as reality reasserted itself, and instantly, I knew what I had done. Tara’s arms slipped from around my neck and I spun to catch her as she fell, terrified that I had hurt or maybe even killed her with the jump.

  She seemed fine by all appearances, other than being very pale and a little green. That was explained easily enough when she threw up. I couldn’t blame her, poor girl. It’d taken a lot of jumps for me to get used to the nausea. I held her upright when she was done, but as soon as she regained her footing, she pushed away from me and stumbled back. I could tell her mind was racing, trying to make heads or tails of what had just happened. Selfish bastard that I was, once I knew she was physically ok, I found myself praying that she didn’t remember what we had been talking about.

  After a few minutes, Tara caught up to the world around her. She turned and pierced me with a look that I can never forget no matter how hard I try. As soon as our eyes met, I knew, deep in the bottom of my soul, that she had put everything together. The positions we were in, the sun that had already set seconds early but was now back above the horizon, the inexplicable warp of reality that she had just experienced; they were all too much to explain away. She knew.

  We stared across the gap at each other for what felt like centuries. By the time she said anything, I could already tell how this was going to end.

  “I don’t…I’m not…what the hell happened just now??”

  I sighed.

  “Time-travel.”

  “Time-travel.” She nodded, with an expression of disdainful disbelief, as if I had told her I was secretly the Easter Bunny. But then she saw my own expression, and the disbelief drained from her face. She turned away from me, her hands squeezing her head as if pressure alone could force this weird dream come to an end. Then she wheeled back to face me. “Time-travel?? That’s it, that’s the explanation for all of this?!” She paced frenetically as she processed. “All the weird coincidences, all things you’re so good at…that’s all time travel?!”

  I didn’t respond.

  “Well?!” she screamed, tears coming to her eyes.

  It was killing me to see her like this. I was on the verge of breaking down too, but I couldn’t speak. I had to nod instead.

  “You’ve been going back, changing things?” she whispered, even though she knew the answer. Her voice shook. “You’ve been changing your life? MY life? How could you do that to me?”

  I found my voice at last.

  “I just made things better for you! I only got rid of the problems that you were having, you know? I was trying to make life easier for you!”

  “I can’t believe you.” She shook her head, wiping tear tracks from her face. “You can’t live without challenges! There’s no such thing as a perfect life, Ryan! How could you think that I would even want that??”

  “But I-“

  She cut me off.

  “No. No, Ryan. Don’t.” She shook her head, her pacing increasing under the force of her emotions She cocked her head and let out her breath slowly, the way she did before she breached a difficult subject. “Just..just listen. I love you, but I can’t live in a world where I can’t make mistakes. I need them. Everyone needs them, Ryan! I don’t want to be the same girl for the rest of my life. I want to experience things, to live my life, and if that means I need to struggle sometimes, I’ll take it. But I can’t---“ She started tearing up again. “I can’t live that life with you if you keep cutting things out of our lives!”

  I was terrified. This sounded bad, really bad, and I didn’t like where this was going.

  “O.K, I won’t change your life anymore, I promise. You know me! You know I’ve always kept my word.”

  She shook her head.

  “That’s not enough. I need you to promise never to time travel again.”

  This is where addiction has its power. It slithers into your life, and absorbs who you are. Slowly, so slowly that you don’t notice, but surely, it becomes the most valuable thing in your life. I loved Tara; I thought she was my whole world. Little did I know that the more that I jumped, the more it consumed my devotion until, finally, it came down to this moment. When Tara asked me to give up jumping for her, I didn’t say, “Of course, sweetheart, I don’t need that. I have you!” I didn’t tell her that she was the most amazing thing that ever happened to me. Instead, my emotions shut down and I felt an icy dragon inside of me speak with my voice.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not natural!” She was openly crying now. ”That’s not the way we’re supposed to live!”

  I wanted to reach out and comfort her, but the dragon of addiction was in control now, not my emotions.

  “I’m not like everyone else.” My voice was frigid. “I have the power to change things, no one else does. I have to use it. It’s what I’m supposed to do.”

  She froze, her eyes wide with shock. Even in her emotional state, she was stunning. For a brief moment, I felt a flicker of love through the ice, but it was quickly frozen. She was clearly dumbfounded by what I had just said; her blue eyes were filled with shock and sorrow. When she finally spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper.

  “Do you really believe that?”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t.

  She didn’t look me in the eye. Her voice trembled as she said the words that have haunted my steps for the past 400 years.

  “Then I can’t be with you. I love you, Ryan, but I just can’t.” She bu
rst into fresh tears and rushed past me back toward campus.

  Instantly, I felt like a puppet whose strings were cut. My knees screamed in pain as they hit the ground, but I couldn’t hear it over the cacophony in my head. The ice that had surrounded my emotions seconds earlier exploded under the torrent of heartbreak that was racing through me. I couldn’t talk, couldn’t think. I just sat there, on the side of a road in Ohio, dying inside. That kind of pain was beyond anything that I had ever felt. It was worse than the agony of my first big jump, more torturous than getting hit by that truck.

  I don’t know how long I was there. I lost all sense of time, of hunger, of physical discomfort. There was only one sensation that I accepted: loss. I had just cost myself the one person that I loved, more than life itself. I wanted more than anything to jump back and stop all this from happening, but I couldn’t do that to her. How could I force her to go back to normal life? I could never stomach the lie, pretending not to know every jump I made was a betrayal, even she didn’t remember the confrontation.

  My confusion and suffering grew until I couldn’t bear it any longer. I needed an outlet. I threw my head back and roared at the night sky, attacking the starry sky with my pain. When I could no longer yell, I found a rock-bottom strength, a last gasp of reason. I knew what I had to do. Jumping had cost me the love of my life, and jumping would get her back. Not by deceiving her; oh no, that wasn’t an option. I had to stop myself from ever making that first conscious jump back to 2008. If I never made that jump, I wouldn’t have become addicted and Tara and I would never have fallen apart.

  I stood slowly, my joints protesting noisily after hours of no movement. I knew that jumping back a year would hurt like hell, but all it took was a single thought of Tara for me to realize that I didn’t give a damn. I braced for impact and aimed for that first jump.

  The pain was excruciating, and I wasn’t prepared for the condition I’d be in when I landed. As the world popped back into existence, I crashed into the pine needles and saw myself preparing for the very first leap. I struggled to stand, but the strain of moving almost made me pass out. Panicked, I reached out to the echo, screaming at the top of my lungs.

  I was too late. The echo vanished.

  Instantly, my pain disappeared. I got to my feet, bewildered. I looked around as a reflex and happened to catch a glimpse of my shoes. They were different. So were the rest of my clothes. Somehow, I was wearing the clothes I had worn on the day of that first jump. If I had been confused before, now I was completely and utterly lost. I was still committed, though. I had to get Tara back. Since I missed it that time, I would do it until I got it right. Without hesitation, I threw myself back into the darkness.

  I ended up in the pine needles once again, but this time I was prepared. I leapt to my feet and limped toward the echo. My confidence surged. I was going to stop this once and for all!

  The echo vanished.

  I swore, frustration and helplessness combining into rage as I jumped again. Again I ended up in the pine needles and again, the echo vanished before I had a chance to stop it. Over and over, jump after jump, I repeated this cycle, until I came to the inevitable conclusion.

  I had failed.

  August 19 th, 2012

  Year Two

  Chapter 6

  Helplessness is the worst feeling. I know that’s a bold claim to make, but really think it through. Take any moment when you’ve felt rage, sorrow, happiness, etc., and examine it. There was always a reason for those emotions, and always something that you could do to act upon them. You may not have thought so, but that’s a decision that you made in the moment. Whether morality or sanity prevented you from acting is another matter altogether, but the truth is, you had the opportunity to change the outcome. Helplessness, true helplessness, is what makes you ache at funerals, what causes you to weep when diagnosed with cancer, what turns a natural storm into a natural disaster. What allows us to move on is the ability to find an escape from our trapped state. We turn to friends, or to religion, or maybe to drink, and we drown that God-forsaken feeling. Not with action, but with avoidance.

  What do you do when there is no place left to run?

  ****

  There is no way that I could ever tell you what I went through those first few days of August. There are no words, no possible way to convey the heartbreak, the confusion, the helplessness that I felt, as I was forced to live freshman year for a second time. Yeah. And you thought your freshman year was bad.

  Really, what was killing me was being close to Tara. She was so beautiful, so sweet, so accessible. If I had allowed myself to, I could’ve reached out and spoken to her. She had no idea who I was, no memory of the man who broke her heart on that stretch of Ohio blacktop. But I did. I knew exactly what kind of person I had become. I clung to the delusion that I understood what had happened to me when I had tried to undo the past. I guess it was easier to pretend that I was in control than to endure that all-consuming impotence.

  The truth was I had absolutely no clue why I couldn’t jump to the right moment in time to stop myself. I’d had absolute focus, one goal that should have lead me right to the perfect moment, yet I continually landed too late to prevent the echo from jumping. My gift had failed me, and now I had to wander through last year again like I gave a damn. May couldn’t come soon enough. I set up a calendar to keep track of the time. That’s ironic, isn’t it? A man who controls time and still uses a calendar.

  I devoured everything I could get my hands on about time travel. Theoretical physics, Hawking, Einstein, “Back to the Future” novelizations, anything even remotely related to the ticking clock burning a hole in my thoughts. Nothing helped.

  Let me explain why: Everyone has time figured all wrong. They treat it like a material thing, something that can be measured and quantified. Miles per hour, hours, years, are all relative human constructs that are as close to accurate as we can get. Start considering the true implications and nature of time and you’ll wind up getting is one colossal brain fart. No one, not Einstein, not even me, can truly understand time. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve invested more hours thinking about this than Einstein and Hawking combined.

  I’d had to come to some practical, relevant conclusions. As far as I can tell time is fluid until it’s interrupted by something. Let’s say that something is me. Once that happens, it’s like a rubber band. It’s one connected loop, but if you grab it at opposite ends and pull, it tightens into a straight line. That’s the simplest analogy that I can give. Think of the first jump that I made to the Ferris wheel as your left hand holding one part of the elastic, and the last jump I made as your right hand holding the other end. That tightened band represents the year in between. I was free to jump anywhere on that line as long I stayed between those two endpoints, but as soon as I tried to jump outside the boundaries, I got snapped back to the starting point. That’s why I couldn’t jump back far enough when I went back to stop myself.

  Are you still with me or have you dozed off? I know, it’s trippy stuff. In case you’re wondering, at this point of Year 2, I didn’t have any of this knowledge at my disposal. This is all deduced after decades of late-night caffeine highs and drunken revelations. Trust me, you need to be at least a little bit unhinged to make any real progress in understanding time, otherwise the details will drive you berserk.

  I muddled through college life, trying to survive the year. There was many a day when I considered jumping forward to the end of the year, skipping all of this nonsense of school and leaving, never to return again. I didn’t dare try. I understood now that time was a fickle mistress and I had royally pissed her off. Day after day, I replayed the end of Year One over in my head, searching for a way to explain what had happened to me when I jumped back to the beginning of the school year. All I came up with was a migraine. I just didn’t have the knowledge or the hands-on, practical experience that I’d gain later on.

  Just because I was afraid to try jumping forward didn’t mean that I
had given up jumping all together, though. I had sacrificed the girl of my dreams for this addiction, and since I couldn’t have her, I sure as hell wasn’t gonna give that up too. I used it shamelessly, acing tests and charming women, desperate to fill an emptiness that just wouldn’t go away. All the while, I avoided Tara like the plague. Unfortunately, fate doesn’t play fair that way.

  Halloween rolled around, and for freshman in colleges everywhere, that’s a don’t-miss event. For girls, it’s a chance to flash a little skin without being judged, and for guys, it’s fair game to ogle said girls without being labeled as a creep. To top it all off, it’s a great time to cement any and all cliques that have formed during the first two months of school. I didn’t know why I was going. I had already gone to this party with Tara in Year One, so I knew exactly how it would go and a second helping was not appealing. I caved to social pressure, however, and I went.

  The next time that you go to a party, try a little experiment: Find a corner and watch the room. Observe the groups that have already formed, then face the door and see if you can predict what group each wave of newcomers will join. You’ll find it’s pretty easy. Kinda makes you feel psychic. It’s also a fun way to distract yourself from a boring party. Much to my disappointment, it’s not nearly as much fun when you already know what group they’ll pick. I sighed All this party did was demonstrate how little my decisions had affected the world around me. Everyone was wearing the same costumes, carrying the same conversations, and shuffling on with their cookie-cutter lives like they had when I was happy and in love. That bothered me. Did my happiness really matter that little to the universe?

  I decided to stop thinking about it, since it was depressing me. It was time to watch the show. At that point in the evening last time, someone had thought it was a good idea to carry the punch bowl around like it was the Stanley Cup, and naturally, it had slipped and spilled all over one of the football players that nobody liked. I took great personal satisfaction from that, considering my orientation experience with the Buckeye’s freshman team. Sure enough, a drunk frat brother lumbered over towards the drink table and hoisted the oh-so-full bowl. I knew exactly what to look for; a pink feather boa in the hands of a scantily-clad “Vegas girl”, a poorly-timed backwards step of a stiletto heel, a parting of the crowd to avoid the splash, and finally, one soaked wide receiver.