Quarantine Dreams

Return by Kayak

To explain how I ended up here, I'll have to give you some background on who I am and what I've seen. My name's Bryan, and this is my second time going through high school. No, I didn't somehow fail so badly I had to redo the whole thing. In fact, I graduated high school with honors in the summer of 2019, and went on to study aerospace engineering in Boulder, Colorado for a year until an outbreak of a SARS-like coronavirus shut down the entire world in the spring of 2020. It should be impossible for me to know this, because the year's currently 2018. Except the thing is, this whole situation is impossible. I shouldn't be here at all. It would appear that by some stroke of magic I was sent back to the past about a year before writing this. Nobody will believe me if I tell them this, but I've decided to write this story down in the hopes that one day science can explain what happened to me and use this as an eyewitness account of this strange phenomenon.

The quarantine was-er, will be, horrible. At the time I left the future, the death toll was in the hundreds of thousands. It all started when a man in China ate a bat he purchased at a wet market in Wuhan. Within weeks, the city had been closed off by the Communist Party. But it was all too late. Carriers who weren't showing symptoms spread the virus throughout the world, and the entire planet came to a standstill. With the global economy in shambles and everyone stuck at home, it became depressing. Jeff Bezos even became the world's first trillionaire while billions worldwide lost their jobs in a cruel twist of fate. One day in an attempt to alleviate the melancholy, I decided to drive from my home in Reno, NV to the lakeside community of Chester, CA so I could climb California's only volcano-Mount Lassen. About 45 minutes into the drive, I was running too low for comfort on gas and pulled in to a gas station in Hallelujah Junction, CA. After filling up my tank I decided to go inside to get a slushee. I still remember the flavor vividly, though I only got to enjoy it for about 30 seconds. It was a delightful mix of blue raspberry, cherry, and cola. As I left the convenience store, however, a kayak that had been poorly fastened to the roof of an SUV slipped off and hit me on the head. Within seconds of impact I found myself on the broken asphalt of the parking lot baking in the desert sun, covered in my slushee. As I stared up at the sky with my vision quickly getting cloudy, I pondered where I'd gone wrong in life to get me to where I currently was. Then, it all went dark.

"Wake up, asshole," cried a familiar voice in front of my face. "You just missed breakfast and the scoutmaster's fucking livid! We thought you ran off and got lost or something!" As I opened my eyes, I realized I was in a tent. Did I just dream up the quarantine and my trip to Mount Lassen? Was I actually just on a camping trip this whole time? My vision was still adjusting from freshly waking up, so I couldn't tell who exactly was staring down from above my cot.
"Reno?" said I.
"No dumbass! You're at the Summit in West Virginia," said he.
That couldn't be. I'd been to the Summit all of once in my life, during the 2017 National Jamboree. Three years ago. The Summit's closed right now anyway, there's no way I could even be there, I thought to myself. I forced myself up and realized the guy standing in front of me was Gunnar Smith, a kid who I tented with... at the Jamboree.
"No fucking way!" I screamed.
"I'd be mad if I missed breakfast too," he chuckled.
As I ran out of the tent, I realized I was definitely at Base Camp Charlie, where I'd stayed for the Jamboree. The unit flag waving from a pavilion read TROOP 3443, the unit I attended with. And sitting in the pavilion was Andrew Maxwell, the unit's Senior Patrol Leader.
"Weird speech last night, huh Bryan?" he asked me.
I looked at the date on my phone, and realized today was July 25th, 2017. The morning after President Trump's infamous speech at the Jamboree.
"Yeah man, it was pretty odd," I responded. Maxwell was an interesting kid himself. A month after the Jamboree he earned his Eagle and graduated that coming year. Within a week of graduation he knocked up his high school sweetheart. Instead of going to college, Maxwell became a drug dealer and got another girl pregnant as well. But here he was, well before any of that happened. I knew exactly what to ask him to confirm the possibility that I'd somehow been sent back in time.
"This is gonna sound weird, but what're your plans for college?"
"I don't know man, I'll have to see what colleges accept me if and when I apply here in a few months. You're still thinking UT, right?"
At the time (and most of my childhood), my dream had been to attend the University of Texas. However, my GPA wasn't quite good enough and I ended up at the University of Colorado instead. But at the time of the Jamboree, I didn't even know about the University of Colorado. The theory was proven.
"Yeah man, I guess," I responded sadly.

For a good few hours I contemplated what had happened. It wasn't long before I noticed the parallels between isekai-genre anime I watched at college, shows like Re:Zero, Overlord, and Sword Art Online, and my current situation. All those stories involved the protagonist being spontaneously transported to another world after some kind of accident. Re:Zero's Natsuki Subaru found himself in the Kingdom of Lugunica when he exited a Japanese convenience store. Overlord's Ainz Ooal Gown found himself trapped in the world of the video game Yggdrasil when the game's servers shut down. SAO's Kazuto Kirigiya was stuck in the world of the video game of the same title of the anime when the game's developer went batshit crazy and threatened to kill anyone that left. And I... ended up in my own past. The world's most painful and boring isekai.

And so, instead of enjoying the activities of the day, I simply cried under a tree, sweating in the humid Appalachian air for a few hours, listening to music, ultimately feeling sorry for myself. I was listening to an old Scorpions song. The lyric was currently
"if we'd go again all the way from the start, I would try to change the things that killed our love..."
Then my phone buzzed with a notification from Snapchat. I recognized the name instantly. This was a snap from a girl I ended up dating after helping her through a breakup in the summer of 2017... right now. We dated for a good year and a half before she dumped me in the spring of 2019. I never truly figured out why she left me, but I remember we did argue a decent amount our whole relationship over stuff I usually started inadvertently. Because it was my first (and only) relationship, I didn't know too much about women and what pissed them off at the time, something the whole experience taught me lots about. Truth of the matter is, though it had been well over a year since we broke up at the time I was sent back, I never truly got over her. But this time it was different. I knew exactly where I'd gone wrong, and I knew exactly how to understand the way her mind worked. This knowledge combined with the fact that I had the mind and maturity of someone older trapped in the body of a younger version of myself made this the perfect opportunity.

Though the Scorpions never got a chance to go again from the start, I'd been handed a silver platter to start again. Not just with this girl, but with life in general. I now knew exactly which classes to take in this second go of high school to prepare for college, and I knew exactly which college I would get accepted to. In the original timeline, I didn't get my drivers license till I was in college due to a bunch of quarrels I'd had with my father in high school, and a lack of understanding of driver's law. But now I knew how to drive, how to do advanced mathematics, how to speak German, how to code, how to dress well, how to work out, how to apply for jobs, how to file taxes, and how to talk to women. I not only had been sent back to the past, I'd been sent back with the ability to speedrun it! In a way, I'd quickly become the most overpowered version of my high school self! And that, my friends, is the story of how I came back to the past.

Author's Note
The actual dream was far longer (it went all the way to the point I was sent back in time) and more detailed, but because of the fact that I intend this to be a collection of short stories based on my dreams rather than a whole book about how I could've done better as a kid, I chose to end it here. Thanks for reading!