for some reason, I am fantasizing about time travel right now. sometimes when I grow weary of my life, I wonder if I somehow missed an important flash point early in my life. you know, like there was a decision I was supposed to make, but I didn't make it.
sometimes I feel like I am seriously going the wrong way.
but I think of a super nintendo game that me, my brother, and my sister would continuously play way back when called "chrono trigger". the premise of the game is that the heroes have to travel across time to make certain things happen and prevent other things from happening so that the world doesn't get destroyed. on the way the heroes are faced with the bleak hopelessness of the future and the dark desolation of the past. an ancient, magical utopia is destroyed, like all other empires, by mad, ruthless power grabs and greed, and the future is annihilated by nuclear war, the planet left to rot like a hollowed out carcass, a world not dissimilar from the world of mad max and the thunderdome, or the horrific future envisioned similarly by both "The Terminator" and the "The Matrix." and the Enemy that must be defeated is revealed to be a thing that feeds on despair and destruction, and only an awful sacrifice by the main character saves everything.
not that I hallucinate that I'm going to save the world or anything.
I just wonder if I was supposed to go in a completely different direction. I kind of regret that a lot of my life has been spent in acts of wanton self-destruction, and as I start cresting the hill known as Life, I don't particularly look forwards to the ride down.
there is a subplot in the game about a man who gets torn out of his own proper time and into the hellish future, where he lives the rest of his days all by himself trying to build a time machine so that he can get back to his proper time. in the end, he fails, and dies, and days like this I sort of feel like that guy. I sometimes feel that my chances for happiness were somewhere in the distant past, if only I had made the right decisions instead of plunging headlong into the abyss, where I am alone and forsaken, and the worst thing about it is that it's all my fault.
of course, time travel makes me also think of John Titor. I had a dream about him once. I dreamt that I had successfully discovered the secret to time travel and that on the way to the future, I passed him as he made his way to the past.
my fantasy is kind of ridiculous, though. if I really did discover time travel, would I, instead of using that kind of power for the Good of Humanity™, use it instead to fulfill my own petty desires? I'm not sure I would even screw with Fate that much. after all, we are all here by the coalescensce of a trillion billion million different decisions and indecisions stretching all the way back to the big bang, and for me to screw with even one of these choices would mean not only possibly the difference between life and death, but the difference between existence and non-existence.
in the end, I content myself with the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (on which the cult classic series "Sliders" is based.) Even if in this world I am doomed to loneliness, there is probably at least one or two worlds where I found fulfillment and happiness. all I want to be able to do is to be able to see what those worlds are like, to know that even if my future is desolate, that maybe it could've been all right if I had just made the right decisions in the past.
ah, whatever. I don't know why I imagine that it's all down hill from here. although I'm getting closer to it, I'm not quite half way through this life quite yet. surely there's still time for a change. or not.