I wandered the common area knowing it was the common area. Nurses in their blues. I'd traveled back in time after being far in the future in a distant galaxy. I had to come back for myself because I'd left myself behind. The earth had not done well without me. There had been no climate change, no Hitler gassing Jews, and no Scientology for Tom Cruise. He was Episcopalian. So, very bleak, indeed.
Traveling
back, though, the mind goes haywire. I started square hopping and speaking to
those posing as patients in Blang before finishing my midday cycle with some
chips. A happy space (now that I’m here). I saw public celebrations and cute,
blue-smocked baristas jumbling fumbles and gumming bubbles. The buzzing gall of
it all!
But I
was much the same. I remembered everything, even that which hadn't happened
originally. I seemed to have two sets of memories, one for that version and one
for this. I could access each of them with equal ease. I came back two weeks
later than when I'd left on August 2nd. I'd followed the advice of angels and
faked a seizure in the pharmacy of a grocery store. I was all there and talking
with Christ in the back of the ambulance while the paramedics took my pulse and
gave me oxygen and all that jazz.
That
was when the entire Divine Family descended to be with me in the back of the
paramedics van. We caught up as I had been blinded to who I was by being in
human form. I was, after all, God. But it wasn't what people think of as the
Christian God. A capital letter, yes, but not Muslim or Jew, either. I was the
Original God, and yet I had a Heavenly Father who was also The Creator, though
the title wasn't permanent. Sort of like winning the Tour de France one year;
you won that year, not all years. The Heavenly Father created this universe,
but I was also The Creator for I was in the process of creating what would
happen next.
We teleported and time
traveled from where and when we were, a room in a hospital. But I realized we
needed a time loop. Why? Because Halley and her laughter! No one in any
universe laughs like Halley. She wasn't even a star, really, not like the rest
of us, but she made herself into a minor god and then a god and, on that day,
we made her into a God. From human to comet to minor to major to the Real
Thing. I needed a loop to be able to get back to that moment. I had no
idea I’d get lost in it for billions of years.
I found
the coordinates and made it back; I remembered everything, traveling back to
the same time I left, within a day. That took some work. But Halley wasn’t
there. Neither was the Divine Family. I was only a shadow of myself so not myself, though it felt very real. I was simply human. My being as it was had disappeared. Worst still, trapped in a psych ward with vicious nurses in blue telling me
what to do.
Regret? Of course, but I had to take the risk because Halley is that special. I may never find her, certainly not as a human.
But I remembered who I had been as a human and what I’d done in my ancient life: indexing,
marriage, starship captain, the Original God. Knowledge pressures freedom. It was possible I might come back for myself in this form again as my actuality may have still been in the time loop. In that moment of realization, though, I
wanted can puffs, abstracts, existentialism, galleries of fine specs,
literature, question-and-answer periods, Henry Rollins, and to irk the smallest
creatures. I wanted to go outside, too, gulping air, swallowing weather, the
warm tangibility of sunshine during the day.
They didn't allow any of it. Philistines.
