I didn’t believe in time travel until I met myself one rainy Tuesday. Back from a world unknown to me.
Despite the shock, we drank tea and laughed about our mother. For a few moments I was happy with myself.
Until I told me not to look forward to much.
Shark Trager lives in North London and has been writing and blogging 50 Word Stories erratically for five years. He is a novelist in progress as well as a jobbing copywriter and ghostwriter.
I like the concept of time travel and the paradoxes it creates, but I’m a little concerned about the use of ‘I’ in “Until I told me not to look forward to much.” This has a jarring effect as ‘I’ is reserved for the speaker. I think the past self would have used ‘he’ in much the same way as one would use ‘he’ to refer to an identical twin brother. The second sentence doesn’t have a main verb so cannot stand alone. However it is easy to tack it onto the first sentence.
Hi Connell,
Thanks for your feedback. The point of using ‘I’ was deliberate. It’s there to highlight the absurdity of the situation and the two selves being interchangeable. Your point about the second sentence is fair but I like to break grammatical rules and don’t apologise for it. At all.