Travelling back in time to meet and be with him...but it's not what I thought it would be, more importantly he's not what I thought him to be. If I had known him the way he really was, would I still travel back to be with him?
Absofuckinloutely...
What happened decides what will happen, but maybe what will happen was decided before what happened and hence, what happened, happened. Okay, I just realized that too much is happening in that sentence. So basically, the past affects the future, everybody knows it and everybody somewhat agrees with it too but what if future also affected the past? All of this would change only one thing, and that one thing, was the only thing that I wanted to change…the present.
But before coming to the present, we must first go back to where it all began, the future – year 2958. Homo Sapiens had evolved into Homo SherMichaelous. HSM’s were what Sapiens would call weird beings. They belonged to no single race because their skin color changed throughout their lifetime, every five years to be particular. They were kind and empathetic to almost a level of self-hurt. Physically HSM’s were beautiful people. They were tall, lean beings with bouncy curly hair, a strand of which was let loose on one side of their forehead, draping their beautiful faces partially like the half-closed curtain of an empress’s bed chamber, these soft curls caressed sleek, angular and sharp cheekbones that slided down to meet square chiseled jawlines and form almost perfectly symmetrical faces.
HSM’s were adorned with aesthetically slender arms and legs, inverted triangle shaped bodies with broad shoulders and narrow waists.
However, what truly made the HSM’s captivatingly beautiful was smiles that met the eye. Unlike homo Sapiens, HSM’s did not smile first with their lips but rather their eyes. Their big brown, round, sparkling, doe like eyes would curl up and lift the cheek bones and their pink lips would follow suit. When they curled up and reached their apex height, the lips would slightly part to flash perfectly aligned white pearl like teeth. How did I know so much about HSM’s? well, I was one. And I know so much about Homo Sapiens, because for my masters dissertation I studied ‘The spinal structure of Homo Sapiens of the postmodern age’, unfortunately education was one institutions that HSM’s were unable to get rid of, so yes, assignments, dissertations and exams are here to stay for the next 1000 years.
Anyways coming to the story, our story…it was while I was working on my dissertation that I came across a Homo Sapien called Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson. Where and how do I even begin to describe him. The memory of the first time I saw him is embroidered in my mind like a little rose at the corner of a white, silk, lace-bordered handkerchief.
It was a particularly cold day, the temperatures were freezing at -175 degree Celsius, all the people at the ice cite had heart warmers to keep their hearts from freezing. The archeologist assistants were drilling through the ice to unearth old video footages of homo sapiens. The machine stopped when it hit a block of ice covered DVD, lying between frozen icicles like unthawed chicken.
“Carmen!” the head archeologist called out
“yes Alex?”
“Jackpot. From the looks of it, this seems to be a DVD from the 1980’s”
“Amazing! Bring it to the caravan, I’ll set up the devices to restore the video”
I headed back to the Van and set up the micro vision machine on the table. The MVM i.e. the micro vision machine is a window sized screen that has a single box like slot which accepts any archaic storage devices from Cassettes to CD’s, DVD’s, Pen drives, restores any information that was once stored in it but might have been deleted or decayed and converts them into touch vision format.
“Here it is” Alex said, coming into the van “I’ve cleaned and dried it up”
“Fantastic. And now…Show time”
“wait I’ll close the curtains, incase the sun comes up”
“No need Alex, it has been snowing for forty days straight, I don’t think we’re going to see sunlight for another week or two”
“Okay, if you say so”
The micro vision machine merged the image in the device with the surrounding source of light, hence it was advisable to have only one source of light in the room so that the image would be concentrated at one place and not scattered around the whole room, else it would be like watching a 3D movie from all four sides of a closed theatre.
“Alex! The temperatures are dropping, we’re going to need another set of heart warmers” someone screamed from outside
“um, I’d better go look into it. Will you be fine on your own?”, Alex asked plugging in the device
“yes, I just have to click play, I guess I can manage that on my own Alex”
“okay, call me if you need any help”
“Will do”
The room was dark again as Alex shut the door behind him. Since it was pitch dark outside, even with the curtains open, there was only one source of light and that was the micro vision machine. So I placed the DVD in the slot and hit play. The screen began spinning…converting the video to light particles…just as the screen showed ‘99% complete’, the sun shone through the window out of nowhere and the entire van lit up. I tilted towards the window, grabbed the curtain end and was about to close it when I heard a voice behind me
“Welcome to the making of black or white”.
I rotated my chair around, and there he stood before me, in the rays of the sun, his face brighter, one with light, larger than life…there he stood before me
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“I’ll do another one too” he said as the camera panned out of his face and onto a clap board
I watched him as he stood there annoyed as people kept interrupting his take, I watched him step on the foot of a dancer and be embarrassed about it, I watched him goof around with the director, I watched him break into giggles when an impersonator did an impression of him…for the next half hour, I watched him and when the video was over, I knew, for sure, that I couldn’t go back to living my life the way it was, because the second half of my soul, the missing puzzle piece, was just in front of me, singing and dancing and laughing.
