WE'RE ALL IN the same space and time, but experiencing different perspective realities. The woman next to me is prosaic. The guy behind me is screaming his esophagus out. And I’m bug-eyed with excitement because I know I’m the winner of a one-in-a-trillion experience.
I’m always in the present, and that keeps me balanced and alert. I taste my food when I eat it. I know the banisters in my apartment building are made of wood. If I see a cute cat, I give it a pet. The past is gone, and the future never comes—what’s the point of wasting brain power on what’s not real?
The queen of transcendental meditation next to me isn’t aware of the here and now. Her mind is probably back home where she’s hugging her kids or kissing her husband or snuggling with her big hairy dog. And when she’s really with them, her perspective reality is likely on some picayune work thing. Or on that shoe she should take to the cobbler before it’s too late. Bygoners, as I call them, record their football games and take pictures at the circus. They don’t realize that the memory of a kiss isn’t a kiss.
Caruso behind me obviously has a perspective reality that’s perpetually in the future. Musing about what might come can be an entertaining place to lay one’s thoughts for a moment if the perspective reality is optimistic and recognized as wishful thinking. But Time Jumpers, as I call this variety, are a glass-half-empty crowd. They see ticking time bombs everywhere. The dam always has cracks. Obsessing over things that have never been is such a waste of brainpower.
Wow! An old lady just did a backflip out of her chair and a cartwheel. That was amazing! I’m sure both the Bygoner and Time Jumper totally missed it. What a shame. They may as well be dead already.
I look out the window. The world is rushing up at me at three hundred miles per hour. The patchwork of fields is doubling in size every second. They’re growing watermelons down there! Is that a real donkey?
— CRAIG PROFFITT
Craig Proffitt is an award-winning writer and Pushcart Prize nominee. His long fiction includes The Opulent Life Option novel and The Rise of the Light Catchers series. His short fiction can be found in The Ekphrastic Review, Flora Fiction, TMP Magazine, and elsewhere. Fencing and filmmaking are some of his other passions. Puerto Rico was Craig’s home from birth until he was nine. He now lives with his family and a reasonable number of cats in Santa Fe.