text: Time has often been described as sand, falling through a great hourglass that is life. However, I find that it is more akin to a great river: vast and gentle from afar, but swirling with changing rapids in every nook. Consider a ripple. The disturbance seems to not have an effect on the river as a whole, but inspect any rapid somewhere down the stream, and you’ll find it directly influenced. It is this property that renders the waves and currents of time unpredictable and mysterious. One cannot possibly trace every drop of water in its journey down an infinite slope, cannot possibly measure every minute fluctuation of its velocity. Such a feat would be to conquer time itself, to thrust oneself out of the third dimension through which we’re born and into the fourth, where time itself is still and unchanging, and all that was, is, and ever will be is already decided. No, the feat is impossible. But I have come close. I have sent out machines like scouts to the wild, observing every quantum particle in its every aspect. Heisenberg would call me a fool, but his so-called uncertainty is of no obstacle. For is it not destiny already for me to approach this task? Even if to see is to change, was it not already set that change must be made? But I digress. Truly, thinking on time and the effects of its grasping are a migraine at the seed. I have come to realize that seeing the future is to see how fixed your own fate truly is. That our concept of free will is nothing but a series of logical reactions in the chemical structure that is our brains. And so I do not look into the currents of the future, but the currents of the present, and their relationship to the surfacing waves of the next great catastrophe of life. I must protect the world from the sadness of the inevitable, but I must also not shirk my duty to use this cursed knowledge for the betterment of all. It is true that a secret is like a virus, and one that will spread to those that touch it. For this reason I have infected only a select few, trusting them to remain sanitary. I call them my sailors, but they must ride across time to gaze not at the ripples in the water but at the growing swells that threaten to capsize them. The difference is that my sailors have not oars but rocks, so that they may drop one into the water at such a time and place as to negate the swell before it could even appear. “Do not look at it as time travel,” I told my sailors one day. “For it is more like time sight. I will allow you to see the future from afar- to gaze at the picture of it and grasp its image- and you may then act on what you have seen.” But even they do not know of the sadness. The inevitability. The futility. Some days, they look upon a failure, and say, “What have we done wrong?” I so want to say, “Nothing, for you have done everything you were meant to.” But that would remove their illusion of free will, of having impact at all. For the truth is... the truth is that seeing a real future is to become a slave to it. To know what is to be and have no power to stop it. They say we spend most of our day in waking hypnosis. We react in automatic ways, and truly think rarely apart from a few unexpected outliers. However, even in these moments, when I focus with all my mind, my soul- if such a thing does exist- I cannot outwit the future. For whenever I clash with, or wish to act in a way that is directly opposed, I am a man possessed. Literally. By the mind from which my own intelligence is wrought. That is why I do not show them the true future. I show one without their great deeds, without their heroic missions, so they may have inspiration, aspiration, and drive. Though I know I am a slave to the future, I cannot help but derive my last dregs of joy from their blind belief that they are making an irrefutable difference in the world. Pure humanity. I have seen my death. It is suicide, which I am not surprised by. Though I have lived as a slave for much longer than I might have imagined (back when I had to imagine the future) I cannot live this way forever. I know the ending to every great tale to ever be told. It’s terrifying and dull, a blend that twists around my mind with enough emotion to keep me clinging to life by hair, or by a fraying rope to which I know the exact strength. And I know one day, and I know which day, it will finally snap. It is tomorrow. Humanity is not meant for the fourth dimension. Time is not a concept to be conquered. It should be left with some degree of mystery, so that we might play about in its silky shadow but never find ourselves crushed beneath the weight of it. That is why, on the day before my death, I will destroy the boat and leave my sailors landlocked. I cannot bear to think of them sailing ever onward, waiting for the swell they cannot overcome, until they finally are swallowed by the unchanging river I have hidden from them. It is too much, and anyway it is already decided. That is, I have already decided on the day I saw myself writing this very- well. Whatever this is. I hope no one reads this. I hope no one finds this, to discover the sadness of time. I do not want to ruin it for everyone. But I cannot leave with nothing. I cannot leave without some evidence to my being apart from the lasting ripples cascading across a river that appears not to change. So I write this. And in this, I find consolation. In this, I find courage. In this, I find closure. To my thoughts. To my struggle. To my life.