Personal Time Travel

 The evidence on this website is clear. I have recently been stuck in an unprecedented mode of time travel. Time slipped further and further away. So much so, I think the word "slup" could be invented to describe the feeling more accurately. No time for this, and no time for that, all because time slup.

Passion could not stop it. Drive could not stop it. Desperation certainly could not stop it. My writing coaches, circle of author friends, and this website all became frozen in a past life. Glimpses of them appeared on a whiff of guilt each time I walked by my lonely laptop resting on a desk of increasingly heaped crap.

I would try to get back, but thirty minutes of editing, an hour of planning in my journal, a long silent stare at my inspiration board all amounted to nothing more than a wake for my author persona. My words slipped (slup) further from my fingertips every day. It wasn't depressing, not as depressing as it sounds. I found time with my family, time to do small, insignificant household tasks like wiping down the world's most complicated trashcan. Time at work grew longer and longer, too. What is the point of taking a break in a ten-hour day? If I work all the way through, I can finish even more! I never do seem to catch up.

There truly is nothing sad about my missing persona. It isn't even missing, just under a sleeping curse, waiting in hibernation for the flow of time to be just right.

Is the time right? I cannot say, but I can say this:  I woke up on another planet today. This is something my past self has done many times. I could hear the crashing of waves on sand. It is dark, but not night. This is not the first time I have dreamed of a planet in perpetual dusk, although this one is different. The sand is the color of the night sky. I follow the shoreline until the washing sand gives way to a paved staircase of deep blue bricks. The water laps at the edges of the steps leading to the base of a huge tower. Everything is dark blue. The sand is probably the main ingredient for the bricks and cob used to build the tower. The retreating water leaves the surface glossy and slippery, but I am not using my feet to travel, so I won't fall. As peaceful as this scene sounds, I know I am being hunted. But I am not afraid, merely annoyed. What is it this time?

Then I hear the bathroom door slam, the toilet lid smack into the tank, and the relieved sigh of a small child. I am sucked back into the too-fast flow of time once again.