The Jump Journal

by Douglas Corriveau

  “You really felt this way about me?”

  I was so shocked at the lack of animosity in her voice that I was struck dumb. Realizing my mouth was agape, I snapped it shut, swallowed hard, and nodded. She shot a look down at the journal, her long dark lashes covering her eyes as she continued.

  “I wanted to believe that this wasn’t true, that you were crazy. Or a stalker. But you knew things about me that….well, that only someone that I trust would know. Like how you knew about the diary, or what I wanted to do when I was a kid.”

  I found my voice at last, dry and cracked.

  “You wanted to be the first veterinarian to become a pilot and go to space so that you could discover and heal all the space animals.”

  She covered her eyes in embarrassment and giggled. I hadn’t heard that sound in so long that I had forgotten how powerful it was. A flood of emotions broke down the dam that I’d been building for years, releasing the breath that I didn’t know that I’d been holding in a bizarre combination of chuckle and sob. She brushed her hair out of her face, still smiling as she made eye contact with me again. This time, I didn’t blink. Her smile slowly fell and was replaced with a look of tender concern and pity that made my hands tremble. This is Tara at her finest; even though I was, to her knowledge, a criminal who had broken her heart and used a tremendous gift for incredibly selfish purposes, she still managed to feel genuine sympathy for me. She still cared, and that was almost more than I could take.

  “You really have gone through hell, haven’t you?” she murmured. “You ran away to avoid hurting me, and you’ve been living all these different lives, and yet, you never let yourself forget what your actions cost you.”

  “I couldn’t.” My voice was raspy with tension and shook when I tried to control it. “There was only ever one thing that I wanted to do and that was to stop myself from driving you away.”

  There it was. I had said out loud what I had never allowed myself to think: Tara still had my heart and I wanted nothing more than to be free of this wretched excuse of a life and start over clean with her. That confession toppled the last stones of the emotional dam, and I broke. Tears streamed unhindered down my face as I clutched at the table with both hands until my knuckles creaked with protest. I couldn’t bear to see Tara’s sympathy for my pathetic existence, so I burned a hole in the floor with my stare, watching my tears form tiny dots on the cheap carpet.

  Her arms draped themselves around my shoulders and I felt the familiar softness of her cheek against mine. She didn’t say a word, merely hugged me gently from behind as 146,000 days of heartache poured out of me. When the storm finally drew to a close, she sat in the chair next to me and placed one of her small white hands on mine. After 400 years, after everything that I’d been through, I met the eyes of the woman that I loved and let go of the chains that I had created for myself. I was ready to hear what she had to say. She kept it short.

  “What do I need to do to save you?”

  If there were angels watching that moment, I hope that they were jotting notes, because they could take a lesson from Tara. I shook my head in amazement and disbelief as a smile crept unbidden onto my face. I felt the old Ryan Mitchell, the one that I had thought long dead, rise from his grave and stretch out after years of being locked away.

  “Well……I guess… it’s time for orientation.”

  August 19th, 2012

  Have you ever had one of those days that you couldn’t describe if you wanted to? The kind that dazzles you, terrifies you, thrills you, and bewilders you all at once? I had one today. I’ll try to capture it in writing.

  I had just started my freshman orientation at Ohio State, and I had already wound up on the bad side of a modern day Goliath and his ham-sized fists. Somehow, miraculously, I reversed time and flipped the tables, leaving the giant beaten in the dust. I still can’t get over that. I freakin’ REVERSED TIME, man!! But the crazy thing is, that’s not the weirdest thing to happen to me today. After the hullabaloo with the football player was settled, I wandered off to test my new ability. I had just decided to jump back in time to when I was fifteen when I heard a thud on the grass behind me. I whirled around to find myself staring at, well, myself. And I didn’t look good.

  This incredibly cute blonde with the bluest eyes that I’d ever seen struggled to her feet and braced herself against a nearby tree, gasping for breath. I barely noticed. I couldn’t look at anything other than the other me barely alive on the ground. He was wearing completely different clothes and he seemed to be my age, but somehow...older. He had a death grip on a cell phone in one hand and a leather-bound book in the other. I thought he was dead until I noticed the slight rise and fall of his chest.

  The girl shoved me out of the way and knelt down next to him, yanking the cell phone out of his hand and dialing 911 with shaking hands. Fighting off dizziness, I joined her, listening to her frantically try to explain our location to the operator over a flaky connection. She put the phone on speaker as the operator relayed the information to a nearby ambulance and Ohio State’s campus safety. She gently shook my doppel-ganger, trying to rouse him from unconsciousness. After a few tries, she muttered, “I’m sorry, Ryan,” and slapped him as hard as she could across the face. Understandably, I freaked out.

  “What the hell are you doing??”

  “Shut up! We need to wake him.”

  “But you can’t just slap me! Uh, him! The ambulance is coming, they’ll take care of him!”

  “That’s too late, we need—“

  The other me groaned and shifted in agony, his eyes fluttering open. Dimly, he looked over at the girl and smiled slowly at her. Smiling back with tears in her eyes, she nodded in my direction. His eyes followed her cue, and when our eyes met, his expression did a rapid turn-about from gentle to wrathful. For a guy obviously suffering incredible pain, he was fast. In one second, his hand shot up from the ground, grabbed my throat, and yanked me down to close to his face.

  “Listen to me, you pathetic waste of skin,” he grated. “If you jump, I swear to God that I will kill us. Do you understand me?”

  I couldn’t answer through his tight grip on my vocal cords.

  “DO YOU UNDERSTAN---“ he trailed as his pain overcame his anger. His grip on my neck disappeared and his arm fell away as he doubled up, tortured by some invisible injury. The blonde offered me an apologetic smile that somehow made the discomfort of being choked by a dying madman evaporate. She struck me as someone that I should get to know better right away. Well, after this weird business of “me” dying on the ground of me was cleared up. Her blue eyes caught the sunlight as she clutched Bizarro-me’s hand.

  “C’mon, Ryan, you can’t die yet. Hang in there.”

  My eyes popped open wide. My doppelganger was dating her? Wow. Wait a second…did she say die??

  He rolled over to face her, his face contorted with agony. I still couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him, but it was clear that it was serious. He couldn’t talk through the pain anymore, but he managed to indicate that he wanted the girl to grab the book from him. As the sound of sirens approached, she turned to me and thrust the book at me. I held it gingerly like it was a snake or something equally unpredictable. Accepting gifts from attractive women who appear out of thin air with dying clones of myself is normally on my no-fly list, but as I met her gaze, I knew instinctively that this girl wouldn’t hurt me.

  “You should go,” She ordered as she spun me around and shoved me into the thicket. “It’d be hard to explain why there are two of you.”

  I moved to run into the woods, but she grabbed my wrist and locked eyes with me.

  “Read fast. Start with the envelope first. It’ll explain what’s going on right now.” Her expression softened into an expression that I couldn’t identify, but it gave me butterflies in the best way. “I’ll see you later.”

  With that, I raced off into the woods as the medics entered the clearing to start their work. I ran for about five minutes to make sure
that I was far enough away, then found a stump to rest on. I ripped apart the envelope like an animal, eager to get some answers as to what the hell was going on. Unfolding the nondescript white printer paper, I flipped it over to discover some all-too-familiar handwriting. With a nervous gulp and a forced exhale, I began to read my letter to me.

  ****

  Hey. It’s me. Or us, you, I…..really almost any pronoun. By now, you’re probably sitting on that stump in the woods around Ohio State trying desperately to come to terms with what’s happening a few yards away. I wish that I could just give you the Sparknotes version right here in this letter, but I’m afraid that if I do, it’ll be too easy to dismiss and we might end up doing this for another 400 years. Sorry, I forgot, you don’t have the context for that yet. This little addendum to my journal will only help you understand the current situation, not the how or why behind it. Do you remember how you were about to jump back to your 2008 day at the carnival with the Ferris wheel before I crashed in? You have no idea how much that decision cost us, you little prick, and by you, I mean us. I did the same thing. I’ve been trying for centuries to stop you from doing that, but you’ll learn all about that in a second.

  Here’s the most important thing that you need to know: Me and Tara (The blonde. Cute, right? More on her later) are working together to finally reach you and prevent you from getting stuck in a time loop. If that doesn’t sound too bad, you’re an idiot. But just because it’s me I’m dealing with, I’ll give you a little more motivation. Tara is the love of my life, and if we jump, you’ll lose her forever. Once you read the journal that I wrote for you, you’ll understand.

  Let me give you the ending to the story before I give you the beginning. This is the important part, but you’ll need to read the rest of the journal to understand the significance of what I’m telling you. I’m dying right now, so you only have as long as I can manage to fight off the Reaper to read this before it disappears. I give it a day. Maybe a day and a half if I’m feeling up for a scrap with the scythe-wielding bastard. So listen up, kid.

  Once Tara agreed to help me, we began the planning process. I threw myself into the work with more vigor than I’d had in decades. I finally had a cause worth fighting for again, and this wasn’t just any old cause, like collecting Box Tops or ringing the Christmas bell for the Salvation Army. This was Tara, the heart and soul of everything that I had desperately searched for during my stay in the purgatory of 2012. I knew that if this worked, if I could pull this off, I wouldn’t mind the inevitable sacrifice that I would have to make. I decided to avoid telling Tara about that part for as long as I could.

  I had to explain the specifics of jumping to her as best as I could. She had a pretty good grasp of it from the journal, but my rambling notes weren’t exactly concise. Of course, I had to remind her how I had mistakenly jumped with her on my back and how by doing so, her memory of the time-reversal had stayed intact. After an excruciatingly long time to contemplate what that meant, I had come to the realization that it didn’t matter how it worked. What mattered was how it could be used.

  If Tara jumped back with me, she would suffer few physical side effects and would be able to act as my hands and mouth to convey my message to the echo, or rather, to you. More importantly, the as-yet-unexplained phenomena of taking someone back with me eased the pain of jumping enough that I just might be able to break that barrier and get back a little bit earlier. It was risky, but not for Tara. I wouldn’t have come to her if I had thought it would be. For me…..well, I could die. Not die like I am right now in your time, but die completely, destroyed by the time stream. Or worse, I could fail to reach the echo at all and be stuck once again living another year, affecting nothing and accomplishing even less. Despite it all, I knew that this was the crucial make-or-break moment. This outcome would seal my fate as either a man without hope or a man with a new lease on life.

  I revealed my plan to Tara and she was naturally a little nervous, but she called upon her courage and agreed to do it. I loved her all the more for it. Then I told her the downside: In every scenario, including all of the good ones, I would die. The sheer crushing weight of the time stream would wreak havoc with my body and if she couldn’t get my journal to the echo in time, it would all be for nothing. She clearly didn’t like that. She argued with me, saying things like “you can’t know that!” and “it could all work out fine!” What she didn’t realize was that if I successfully stopped you before I died, my life would continue on with you. I’d already lived more than my lifetime. By stopping you, I would finally be free.

  So here we are. As I write this, Tara is readying for the jump, rehearsing what she needs to tell you, and I’m making sure that I haven’t missed anything. It’s time for your instructions. Here’s what you need to do...

  1. Run to your dorm. Don’t stop, don’t talk to anyone, just get to your laptop and look up Tara Matthews.

  2. Print out her picture and memorize her face. It’s her senior picture and if we pull this off, one day it will be the best decoration your room will ever have. You’re welcome.

  3. Write these words underneath it: IF YOU EVER JUMP, YOU WILL LOSE HER.

  4. Read the journal. And read it fast. Take notes to help you remember because that book will vanish from your hands when I die.

  5. NEVER LET HER GO.

  Don’t let us down. We need this one to work.

  More than you know.

  ****

  I folded the letter back up, dumbfounded. I couldn’t reconcile the physical world that I knew and trusted with the events of today, and yet, there was a football player on campus with a massive bruise on his face, a dying futuristic version of myself less than a stone’s throw away, and a letter in my own handwriting begging me to prevent my world from ending. Off in the distance, a faint siren screamed for attention and faded as the ambulance drove away. The sound of that siren snapped me out of my shell-shock. Leaping off of my stump, I ran like hell in the direction of my dorm room.

  As soon as I got there, I raced through the first three instructions and dove into reading the journal like a man possessed. Instantly, I was hooked. I devoured entry after entry, experiencing an otherworldly connection to this book. It was written exactly how I would’ve written it, from every turn of phrase to every run-on sentence. I could practically feel the emotions and the experiences of the journal as if I’d lived it. I was so engrossed in my reading that I barely noticed when there was a knock on my door.

  I swung the door open to find Tara standing shyly in the hallway. After everything that I’d read about her and how I felt about her, my pulse raced. Stammering, I invited her in. She flowed into the room with a natural grace that I could’ve watched all day. Instantly, I knew that everything that future me had written about her was true. I was already falling for this girl. I just didn’t know how she felt about all of this.

  She traced the edge of her picture, her blue nail polish complementing her amazing eyes perfectly. She looked like she was having a tough time keeping everything together, and after the day that I knew she’d had, I couldn’t blame her. Still, she was handling it far better than most would have.

  “We won’t remember, you know.”

  Her voice was a warm alto and led me to believe that she could sing really well. I hadn’t noticed before.

  “What?”

  She cast a look over her shoulder at me, rueful.

  “We won’t remember him, the book, or anything about what happened in the clearing and neither will anyone else. Since you never jumped, the loop never existed, and so he never had to come back to this time.”

  “So….what will we remember? I mean, today hasn’t exactly been forgettable.”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t know…..even he doesn’t know. But when he….” Her eyes misted. “When he……moves on, he knows that we won’t remember anything directly related to him. I won’t know who you are or who he was, and everything from the journal will be lost.”


  Then it dawned on me.

  “So that’s it.” I shook my head in admiration. “You clever bastard.”

  “What?”

  “Now I know what the picture and the writing is for.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  I grinned. I knew my own thought process well enough to recognize a plan when I saw one. With some quick mental juggling, I identified the next potential snag and worked around it.

  “Tara, he-….well, we have a plan, trust me. I don’t know if he explained it very well to you, but I get it. In order for this to work out, I need you to go to your dorm, or someplace where you were around this time during orientation.”

  “Are you sure? I mean, when he dies, we won’t remember each other. Shouldn’t we stay together?”

  “No, trust me, if we both have amnesia and you can’t remember how you wound up in my room, that’s not good at all. The last thing that I want is for you to think that I roofied you or something like that.”

  She giggled slightly, and that small sound was just enough to boost my confidence about what I was saying. She turned toward the door, but hesitated and looked back at me.

  “How do I know that you’ll remember me?”

  I took a step toward her and said with complete honesty, “Even if I forget you completely, I will still find you. Do you believe that?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, she kissed me. A gentle, slow, forget-me-not kiss that I can’t describe with mere words. With that, she left, closing the door behind her. I stood in the center of the room, trying to savor the lingering feeling of her lips on mine. I realized that I still had something important to do, so I snapped myself out of my reverie and pulled out a spare notebook and a pen. With all of the speed that I possessed, I started to journal. I recorded everything from the intervention to the start of this entry. I’m going to go to bed now and try to get some rest. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll be sleeping tonight.