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Back in the summer (it feels like a long time ago) I shared a short story I wrote on this blog, and inadvertently started a new series where, once every few weeks I share a short story I’ve been working on. The last one of these I shared was I Was There. This week I’m back with another one of those, called The Traveller. I’d love to hear what you think of it. Let me know if you’d like more of these in the future.

— The Traveller —

This is the story of how I discovered time travel. I bet you didn’t expect to hear that today, did you? I bet you’ve never actually met a time traveller, not an honest or sane one anyway. So why should you believe I am who and what I say I am? Why should you believe I’m a time traveller, honest, and sane?

I’ll tell you why, and how I learnt to travel to the future, but first, we need to go back. 

It all started a couple of years ago. Daphne and I went out to brunch one Sunday morning. We had a grand old time, had some waffles to die for, and a little too much to drink. Okay, a lot to drink. You can’t go for bottomless brunch and not get your money’s worth, can you? After brunch, we got an Uber back to mine. During the car ride home, we talked about having a lazy afternoon watching Friends re-runs and debriefing about all the weird people and things we spotted and overheard during brunch. 

As we waited for the lift to arrive at the ground floor, three loud girls entered the building and walked towards us. Daphne gave me a look I’d seen many times before, one that was easy enough to recognise. She was telling me – without using her words – that she was in no mood to share a lift with them. Any other day, I would’ve shared her sentiment – I mean, who wants to deal with drunk, boisterous people in a cramped elevator on a warm day? – but I was 80 per cent mimosas and waffles, and I was in no position to take the stairs. She made for the staircase and I held my breath for the hellish, three-floor ride I was about to put myself through. But then the girls turned around, went through the double doors of the lounge area, and made themselves comfortable on the massive sofa in front of the TV. Yay for me. Poor Daphne, putting her legs to the task for no reason. 

The first thing I noticed when I got in the lift was how shiny and swanky it was, which made sense. There was an email from the building management a while back about the plans to put the new lift in place. I guessed they’d finally done it. The second thing I noticed was that I got more light-headed than usual when the lift started moving. I’m no stranger to that feeling you get in a lift once it leaves the ground. I know there’s a proper explanation for it – something to do with the earth’s gravitational pull and our body mass – but I barely paid attention in science class at school, so all I remember is that it happens due to how we experience gravity and how it impacts our weight when we travel vertically. The point is, I felt more light-headed than I’d typically feel for a three-floor lift ride.

I got off the lift and into my flat, only to see Daphne sprawled out on my sofa. She’s my oldest friend and I love her to bits, but Daphne, bless her, can be a bit of a slob. I couldn’t have been more than a few minutes behind her, but in that time, she’d somehow made herself a cup of tea, drank my rosé, and had some crumpets. And I know it had to be her because I didn’t leave my flat in that state before heading out to brunch. 

She woke up as I started tidying and cleaning up after her.

“Where you been, babes?” She said, as I went to grab the butter-stained plate from the coffee table. “Been waiting ages for you, thought you got lost on the way to your own flat or something.”

“What do you mean?” I grabbed her mug and wine flute and loaded the dishwasher. 

“You had me worried, ya know? Was even buzzing and texting ya.”

Always the exagerator, our Daphne. ”It’s only been a few minutes, Daph. And you didn’t call or text. Maybe the booze is doing all the talking?”

“Look, babes,” she said, as she struggled up to a sitting position. “I’m a bit drunk, I know, but you really had me worried. Check your phone. I must’ve fallen asleep trying to check on you.”

Daphne and I have known each other since we were kids. I know her like I know myself, which is to say I know what she’s like when she’s drunk, and I know what she’s like when she’s lying. I could see, as she crouched on my sofa that afternoon, that she was only one of those things. She was telling the truth, or she believed she was, so I figured I’d humour her. 

I could barely believe my eyes when I checked my phone, but by god, Daphne was right. I’d missed six calls and seven WhatsApp messages from her. I wouldn’t have believed it if I wasn’t staring at the notifications right there on my phone screen. I didn’t hear my phone ring and I didn’t feel any buzz or vibration. I could easily have had the phone on silent while we were out and probably forgot to change the settings when we got back. Or maybe, like Daphne, I was a little drunk. Probably more than a little. I looked at the notifications again and did the maths, the time between the first and last one was 33 minutes, and the last one came in more than 20 minutes before I noticed them. Had I been away for nearly an hour? The math wasn’t mathing. Either my phone and Daphne were lying, or I’d probably blacked out in the lift due to all that booze. The latter was more likely, I’ve always been something of a lightweight after all. Or maybe someone spiked one of my many drinks while we were out. 

The sun set on Sunday and rose on Monday, and I was back at work, thankfully in the comfort of my living room. The first few hours of the morning were as terrible as expected for a Monday, but lunchtime rolled around, and I was determined to take every minute of my hour-long break. After inhaling some leftover pasta from the night before, I rushed down to the building reception to collect my Boohoo parcel. I was excited to try on the new summer dresses I’d ordered. I’d calculated I had just enough time to put them on, record a video of me doing a little strut for Daphne, decide on which ones to keep and which to send back, and package the ones in the reject pile to take to the post office after work. It was a bit ambitious to try to fit all this in before the post-lunch meeting at 1:30, but I’d done it quite a few times before. 

My lunch break was going according to plan until I went downstairs. I got my parcel easily enough and got the lift back up to my flat, and that was when it all went sideways. I got back up, all excited to put on a little fashion show for myself, only to hear my work laptop going off with endless Teams notifications. I figured there was a lunchtime session going on, like a book club or brown bag or one of those annoying meetings put in over the lunch period when we were supposed to be eating and getting some air and giving our eyes a break from our screens. I’ve always found the concept of lunchtime meetings hypothetical. Company bosses be like “take regular breaks”, “go outside”, “get screen-free time”, “do yoga”, etc, and then they’d create work environments that encourage, if not mandate meetings to occupy every vacant diary slot, including and especially lunchtime. I digress, I’ll get back to the point. 

I thought it was a meeting I’d opted out of, one which didn’t need my attention, so I just ignored the pings. I made a mental note to look up how to mute notifications on my laptop lock screen. and carried on with my dresses. But the pings didn’t stop. Probably a lively lunchtime call, I told myself, maybe one of those where the participants banter and play those silly games on Cahoot in the name of team bonding and morale building. But then I heard the dreaded sound, the one you get when there’s an incoming Teams call. Someone was calling me. Out of the blue. During my lunch break. This happened while I was trying to wiggle out of a dress which turned out to be two sizes too small, contrary to the online size guide. Naturally, I panicked. 

I lurched towards my laptop, but I wasn’t quick enough. I missed the call, but before I could see who was calling, Teams started going off again with notifications. I figured I might as well log back in early since my hopes of a quiet lunch break had been dashed. And this was when I was met with an unruly surprise. 

Keely from HR had been trying to reach me. There was no lunchtime chat, or Drawsaurus session, or brown bag talk, it was all Keely. All the notifications – the Teams messages and the Teams call – were courtesy of Keely effing Pearson from HR. It must have been a dozen messages she’d sent asking for my whereabouts, checking if I planned to join the call, asking if I’d rather reschedule, checking if everything was okay, and so on. The messages got more and more passive-aggressive in tone. At first, I thought “girl, chill, it’s still lunchtime, we’ve got 20 minutes until the meeting”, but then my eye caught the time stamp on the last notification bubble in the corner of the screen. It said the message was sent at 2:30 pm. 2:30 pm, a whole hour after the end of my lunch break, enough time for two meetings, one with Keely and the next with a potential client lead. It seems I’d blinked twice and an hour had gone by, but I didn’t have prosecco or bottomless mimosas to blame. 

I panicked a little, then freaked out a lot, then sat through a telling-off, and then freaked out some more for the rest of the day. Something was wrong with me, and it had me worried. Why was I blacking out for minutes and hours on end? Did I need to see a doctor? I figured I’d keep an eye on it for the next few days first, to make sure it was worth going to the doctor for. I mean, what was I going to say? “Hey doc, I  think something’s wrong with me, I’ve lost track of time a few times in the last few days.” I could just imagine the doctor nodding with a straight face and shooing me out of his office as nicely as possible. Needless to say, I wasn’t going to see the GP without more evidence, in case it all turned out to be in my head. 

It wasn’t just in my head. It happened a few more times over the next few days. I lost an hour on the way home from Tuesday night yoga. I lost three hours after my Wednesday morning run. I lost nearly two hours on Thursday evening after hanging around in the communal lounge in my building. It’s weird when I think about it all now, but looking back, by the end of that week, I wasn’t as freaked out as I thought I’d be. In fact, I was surprisingly zen, because I'd put my mind to the task and I’d finally worked out why it was happening. I just needed to test my hypothesis, and sure enough, I did, on Friday night. 

I’ll save you the psycho-babble on my methodology and cut to the chase. All the blackout incidents had one thing in common. They all involved being in the lift, or going up the lift, to be specific. That last part – going up – is crucial here, as it was quite the revelation. I know this because I applied the scientific method to my investigation. I might not have paid much attention to science at school, but I’ve been making up for it in my 20s through PopSci books and podcasts. Anyway, through my systematic process of observation and elimination, I deduced that time moved normally, or appropriately when I went down the lift, but when I went up, well, that’s when time went by in unpredictable ways.

I’d finally figured out why and how I was losing hours at a time. I had my own one-directional time machine. What, then? Well, first came the regret over the lost time. Then came the pondering and wondering about the mechanism. I knew it was a new lift, so that explained why it seemed to happen out of the blue. But what about the why behind the why? That was the next thing to occupy my thoughts. I didn’t manage to find an answer to this, I’m afraid. 

But after all the pondering, wondering, questioning, and theorising, I sat with the thought and confronted the reality of the situation. I had at my disposal, a device, or machine, or mechanism 

which enabled me to travel to the future, seemingly for a random number of minutes or hours at a time, without the ability to recoup the lost time. You'd think this is the last thing I'd want when I'm always short on time, forever in a hurry, and never with enough hours in the day. You’d think I’d want nothing to do with this, right?

P.S.: My debut non-fiction book, Art Is The Way, and my middle-grade novella, A Hollade Christmas, are out everywhere now. You can get them in all good bookstores and from all major online vendors.

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