Here and Now

Pedalling through the park, after I'd told you my dream about losing you in time, we sat up straight on our bicycles, and we started to put the pieces of us together. We realized that there were just too many coincidences: Too many congruencies, too many parallel tangents. We were too right. We were too goofy, and we were too mad.

And suddenly it all made sense:

Time travel.

It had to be time travel that conspired to bring you here when here was the last place you'd ever want to be. Time travel that landed us in this right place, at this right time.

It was likely me who sprung it: ever the grandiose romantic. In my greying years, I popped out of a temporal singularity, all pinstripes and bowler hats and walking canes, all monocles and curly moustaches and intricate pocket watches. I must have strode into that office, and pinned that dragon of a co-ordinator to her chair, telling her in a faux british intonation, some four decades wrong, that Okinawa couldn't have you, that you were meant for the frozen north.

And stepping back off her, I adjusted that pocket watch and winked off back to the future.

She, for her part, was left agog, wondering why an apparition so similar to her decades-dead daddy should come to her over a matter so minuscule as the appointment of exchange English teachers.