A Time Travellers Wife

Chapter 2 - The last telegram

Dear diary,

Once I had finished the previous diary entry, I felt as if a huge weight had just fallen off of my shoulders. After all this time of bottling up my emotions inside of me, I had finally written down my thoughts onto a piece of paper, effectively releasing them into the open world so I no longer had to deal with the pain. Ever since then, I have almost been living a normal life; I spoke to a few of my friends, I even went out for coffee with one of them, and I got to see some of my family members again. I had almost forgotten how good it was to go outside and feel the sun hit my skin. But being all caught up in the moment, I had totally forgot about re-reading the notebook I had made of all the telegrams my husband had sent me, and now, that is about to change.

A few hours had now passed, and I had spent it all looking for that damn notebook. My home has become such a mess while I was outside being social. Things were out of order, my dirty clothes were all over the furniture, half-finished meals just sitting on the dining table waiting to be cleaned up, used mugs on the coffee table next to the couch, and not even the bed was made. But funnily enough, none of this had bothered me until now, it's like the mess had just appeared as soon as I decided I wanted to find something. So after all this looking around the house, I decided to call it a night. I made a mental note to myself that I would just try again tomorrow, being adamant that it would show up somewhere.

I woke up, turned to my side and saw that the clock hanging on the wall was pointing to 12:09. It was dark outside, so I guess it was night time. I felt well-rested and it seemed like I had been asleep for at least a few hours. As I sat up and looked around the room, I noticed something almost shining at me from the top of the bookshelf. It was definitely a book of some sort, so I got out of bed and reached for it. After taking it off the bookshelf, I looked at the cover and realised that it was the notebook I had spent most of yesterday looking for, filled with the telegrams that my husband had sent to me. At that point, I literally jumped for joy, jumping and dancing on my bed and making it even messier than it already was. Suddenly, I stopped and looked down at the bed beneath my feet because I had noticed something fall out of the notebook. I bent over, picked up the telegram that had fallen out and quickly scanned over it. The date seemed very familiar to me, but I wasn't sure what was so special about that specific day. It took me a while to notice, but I realised that the year printed on the piece of paper was in fact 2200, meaning that this was the very last telegram I received.

Of course, I knew reading this telegram before any of the others would be like starting at the end of a novel and then working your way to the start, but I couldn't help myself. I mean, the telegram was already in my hand just begging to be read. As per usual, it started with "Dear Amanda," and then jumped straight into the action. I can imagine that most people would hate how he did that, but I liked it. It's like he was just cutting out all the boring and unimportant bits to make the story more interesting to read. It was quite strange reading this telegram. I mean, I know that I have read it a long time ago, but it felt almost like I haven't, like the note had changed from what it was a year ago. But that's enough of me talking about the telegram itself, I'll just write it down:

"Dear Amanda,

I know that the date of this telegram may be a little bit off schedule, give or take a few years, but I hope it gets to you around the same time as I have usually been sending them to you. The machine has been doing strange things lately. I know you don't really understand the technical side of things when it comes to my time-machine, but I'm sure you'll understand it when I say that the engines are about to explode. You see, the engines run off a fuel source called "Time Energy", and this is what allows me to travel through time. Each time I go to another time zone, the journey itself creates some time energy, which is just enough for me to recharge the fuel cells and go somewhere else. You see, one time I had tried to get back home to you, to tell you about all my adventures that simply could not be translated into words on a piece of paper, but the machine would not let me. I tried so hard to get into your time zone, but the engines couldn't handle it. It was creating way too much time energy, eventually leading to the engines going critical and now, are about to explode. Don't worry, the explosion will not hurt anyone, that's the beauty of the time-machine. When it explodes it creates a single moment in time which is frozen, containing the explosion, and no body will ever know. However, the one downside to this occurring is that I will be trapped on the inside of the explosion."

This is so weird, I definitely have not read this one before. I'm pretty sure I would remember something as bad as this happening. It's probably just my mind playing tricks on me. I think I'm just going to stop reading this for now, I'll come back to it later.

I needed to take a breather, so I got a glass of water, and walked around the house for a few minutes. I walked back into my room, checking the clock as I sat back down on my bed, it reads 12:09. That's weird, I could have sworn that the clock said it was nine past twelve at least half an hour ago. I probably just need to change the batteries again, that dang clock has been giving me quite a bit of grief over the years. But I have managed to put up with its many quirks, mainly because my husband used to love that clock so much, and I never really understood why.

So I sat there on my messy bed for a while, just constantly thinking about him and everything that he used to do. I always found it interesting how he used to have such an obsession over old things. He would always say that the technology now a days is too boring for him, that everything is too small and efficient. Where majority of the technology that they used to have over 70 years ago was a lot more interesting, because you could take things apart and make your own devices if you really wanted to. The amount of personalisation and customisation you could put into those contraptions was what he loved. I, however, was never into those kinds of things. When I bought something and had no intention of taking it apart and learning how it worked, I left all that to my husband.

Anyway, that's enough talk about him for now, well, kind of. I guess it is time to continue reading that telegram. 

Wait, hang on a minute. You know, now that I think about it, the clock hasn't actually stopped working for at least a year. Well that's weird, I wonder why it decided to stop working now.