Past or Present?

I had always had the weird and misunderstood ability to read the people around me -from the shady bookstore owner who read more than he worked, to the mailman delivering papers to the same house nearly seven times a day. But ever since I discovered more about myself, I had been less interested in the perplexing minds of those nearby. It's all fun and games to imagine a situation where you walk in as one person, just to find you have the ability to completely and irrevocably change everything about the present world -that is, at least, until it actually happens.

Sitting on a park bench in the crowded New York Square, I stared at the faint lines on my hands as if they could give me a clue about this so-called power -to change a single historical event. I knew what all my friends would tell me, what one had told me since I conveyed everything to her last night; to research the biggest and most devastating event in history and rewrite it.

The plan had sounded concrete when I left her apartment last night but once I'd gotten home, it had become very difficult to sleep despite the heavy exhaustion plaguing me all day. A pit had grown in my stomach, growing larger and more pressing with every sleep-deprived turn, until it had become what had to be close to the size of a watermelon. And it felt like it.

The uncomfortableness was somewhat reassuring in a way, it told me to wait to issue a verdict; that the proper solution simply hadn't yet bothered to show up. I had long since learned to trust myself when it came to important decisions like these. And I was usually right.

On that bench I thought through some of the worst events a crowded mind scattered with leftover bits of history class could recall; Hitler, sterilization of Indigenous peoples, the predatory way poachers had killed off their prey... All seemed too horrible to contemplate choosing only one to "fix". But that was only a myopic piece of the ability. It was impossible to forget that no matter what alterations I made to the past, there were bound to be radical changes in the present world that I could neither anticipate nor truly claim responsibility for.

I played through the scenarios as if I were scrolling on Netflix for a show worth watching -each storyline ending with more of a plot twist than a Game of Thrones season finale. But in the end, my gut had been right. It was always right. With a sigh, I admitted to myself that to change anything would be unfair to time itself. There was a reason the pen was considered mightier than the sword; a pen can alter something in a way no weapon ever could. Everything that had ever occurred happened for a reason -I had to believe that. And all of those seemingly small events throughout history had led to the relatively well-turning society that was today -a gift that could not be taken for granted. With a smile, I reached down to pick up the closest piece of grass and plucked it from the earth. I felt my hands warm as I used that power some ancient being had somehow decided I deserved and within a blink, that blade of grass was again growing strong in spite of the bustling square.

I took one last look at that precious slice of green, marvelling at the insignificance it seemed when surrounded by such a mundane environment, before standing, turning, and walking back into a society I was moderately surprised to find unchanged.

I felt a weight shift inside of me, not necessarily good or bad, but different. I no longer felt like I was watching my life play out like a movie, but rather as someone who had developed a whole new level of understanding of consequences -and who had avoided a world overflowing with them.