Erasing The Past
by Brooke Kirkland

She swallowed the pill. A mix of fear and excitement plagued her. She pulled a chair beside her to help stable her woozy body and collect her thoughts; if this turned out to be true, her life was in for a complete and drastic change. 

No one believed in time travel, in fact, they laughed and sneered at the thought of it. The mentality of today’s world was that anyone who tried to time travel should be diagnosed clinically insane. But apparently Ellen was supposed to be insane; she had a hard enough time wrapping around the thought of it herself. Time travel by swallowing a pill, one small capsule to change her past. She knew the extreme dangers. Something this drastic would be hard to cover up from her family—there was no turning back now. 

Sweat began to drip down Ellen’s face; the pill was beginning to take effect. She falls to the ground. Stabbing sensations overtook her body completely. Her stomach churned. Her head pounded against her skull. Loud banging took over her ribcage and her heart was pumping as fast as it could. Was this what it felt like to die? No, he specifically told her the pill would work. This wouldn’t be the end. Suddenly, pain was full and alive and breathing and everywhere all at once, the ringing of her ears and pain in her side stopped. It ceased. 

Ellen woke up to the sensation of cold sweat all over her and a muggy atmosphere. Her eyes bolted open; She was lying on concrete. Her eyes were wide with shock—as if someone told her she only had a week to live. She couldn’t tell if the ringing sensation in her ears was from the pill or the overwhelming trauma of thoughts floating through her brain. She takes in her surroundings and sees an empty street, lined with parked cars and vacant stores. Her hearing returns to her, the overwhelming sound of a stressed city hits her—cars honking, people talking, merchants selling. Her stomach was growling and hungry, how long had she been laying there? 

She looked at the date on her flip phone: August 15, 2005. It worked. 

She was back in time seven years. A surge of complete shock hit her: she whips her head around and looks up into the sky, the sound of people is everywhere. She tosses her fingers through her hair and wipes the sweat from her face. She is back in time. She rises from the warm concrete and arrives to the street—the street that changed everything. The same street that she had grown up on, the same street where her mother would walk her across the crosswalk every day for school, the same street where she met him. Daniel. Him.  

Her mind surged into a flashback, overwhelming her frontal lobe with memories of his voice and his smell. She remembered the way he always wore his purple Polo shirt for special occasions, the feel of his overwhelming hands clutching hers, the way his curly hair looked under his beanie hat. Being with Daniel created a whole new outlook on life for Ellen—an outlook that left her permanently changed for the good. Everyone said they were too young. “Too young” to know what love was. But she knew when he delicately touched her cheek for the first time, that his fingerprints would forever be burned there and she would never be the same. 

He challenged her to see life beyond herself, beyond her father leaving them; beyond the lonely feeling she felt whenever it rained, beyond her bony structure, beyond her headaches when she thought too much. “It’s hard to be happy when you’re stuck in a glum state of mind, Ellen,” his eyes desperately searched hers, “Don’t you realize that this pain is only temporary?”  

She clenched her teeth as she laid there on the wet pavement as her mind recreated the memory of Daniel lying in a hospital bed. A black SUV had plowed into his rib cage, collapsing his lungs. The rain clouds above her transformed into the image of her holding his limp and pale hand as the nurses whispered how much time he had left—as if whispering covered up the looming thought that he was about to die. Everyone knew. Pretending pain doesn’t exist doesn’t cause the pain to disappear; it simply postpones it. His hazel eyes opened as he saw her silently crying and praying to herself. He simply had said to her, “Ellen. This is only temporary.” His eyelids closed and never opened again. 

 The agonizing pain of his death left her mourning for seven years, leaving her mind only to constantly recreate the memory, but that was about to change. She arose from the wet pavement and shook her head to rid herself of all the cloudy memories. Today she would recreate the past and have Daniel in her arms once again. Her head ducked around the corners of demanding business owners and traffic horns. She observed the traffic silently and watched a man with shaggy gray hair pass her holding a cup of scolding hot coffee. To them, she was a small 5’2” woman with choppy brown hair, standing in the middle of Grover Street waiting for a taxi. Little did they know that she was on a mission, that she had gone back in time and she was saving a life today. She walked towards a small shop, searching her brain for memories of where Daniel was standing the day he died and internally mapping out a plan to save him. 

All of a sudden, a car honks furiously clear at the other end of the street. Her throat clenches up and her pupils widen. She whips her head around, to watch her brain collect yet another memory of two cars colliding. A violent crash sends a sound wave through the city—her stomach churns. Daniel. She was too late.