Adverse Relations [ON HOLD]

Chapter 1: The Love of His Life

Chapter 1: The Love of His Life

She was the love of his life. She had flowing auburn hair and skin as pale as milk. Her lips were cherry red; her eyes were hazel brown.  He knew that when he first saw her, he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. He wanted to spend his eternity by her side, to wake up beside her every morning and sleep beside her every night. He had inexplicably undeniably fallen for her.

And he never found out her name. You see, Adam Martenson was drunk to the point of no return.  It was the seventies, so he was thirty years into the past. But all his troubles were far away as he saw her dance by the fire. Her hair fell to her shoulders like waves of the sea, crashing into the rocks and subsiding. She was thin, and her eyelashes were long. When they first made eye contact his heart literally stopped and his stomach did a back flip.

Two hours later they were busy in the bushes. You see, the seventies was the time of the hippies. No war, just peace and love. Make love no war was their motto. So choosing out some random gal and making serious love to her was fashion. It was the on-going thing, man. And Adam loved it.

But as she danced around the campfire two hours earlier, he realized that this was something different. Never had he experienced something like it. It was as if, for the first time in living memory, he would do something more than sex with her.

He would do anything for her, man.

And he had never had a better time in his life. It was like she was his other half; like she was physically and mentally made for him.

He never met her again after that day. It was the earthquake that split them apart. As the sun rose above the horizon the very next morning, the ground was shaking so much that many trees had fallen with the magnitude of the quake. He wanted to hold her, but the ground began to split between them and it was too late: He could not jump across. “Run!” Adam shouted across. “Save yourself!” She was wearing nothing but her skin and a blanket wrapped around her, and she hesitated. She said something inaudible. “What?” he shouted.

“Your name! What is your name!”

“My name is… It’s –“ But then it happened. He was gone, lost into the realm of nothingness that was the future. It had happened, and he wished with every particle of being in his shredded soul that it hadn’t.

Ever since then, for the rest of his lives he wished he would have just made that leap. At least he could have tried to make the jump. Even thirty seven years later, he had searched and searched and wished he could find that woman again. But he knew for sure that she was probably already married and had kids and had already settled down.

Adam Martensen had always been a special kid. He was cursed with time travel. So at any point in time he would switch into the past and live another life. He was oblivious as to why in the name of the heavens above as to why this was happening to Adam and Adam alone, but he had nothing to do but to live with it. The Adam in the twenty first century lived with his father and brother in an apartment beside the sea. He would wake up every morning to the sound of the seagulls singing and the waves crashing against the shore. And every morning he awoke he wished his parents were still married and that the family was back together again. It was a childish thought, he had to admit, but it dug at him from the inside. He just wished the curse [or the gift, according to his father] would land itself into the lap of someone else, and he could wash his hands of this double life.

He wanted to be a normal person.

Adam Martensen’s brother Henry Martensen was so much older than Adam that he was older than him by half his age. Although Henry was a bit queer at times he really was a nice man to get along with. Some people called him crazy because of his temper, but other than that and the visions, it was totally normal in the Martensen’s family.

Adam woke up to the sound of his alarm clock ringing. It was half past six in the morning, so it was expected of him to be off to work. He could call the day of he had a desire to; pretty much everyone was aware of his condition.  The doctors diagnosed it as a form of epilepsy, but he was sure that they were wrong. That paranormalcy existed.

He was damn sure about that! He hit the off button on his clock and sat up on the bed. His head felt groggy, but nothing more than the usual. He had a quick cold shower and a tasty warm breakfast and a hot coffee and jumped into a pair of jeans and a shirt. He was the events’ manager at a hotel; it was not a very important job since there were that many, and it had a decent salary. So, this one life was good enough for Adam. More than enough in fact and he would do anything to keep it that way. He brushed his teeth and had a glass of fresh orange juice from the fridge, and caught a taxi outside the apartment door.

One other drawback of his condition was that he was unable to drive, should he Trivel while he was behind the wheel. He liked to call it that because it was easier and no-one understood what it meant except his father and him. Jonathan Martensen was the only person he had confided his secret to, and the only person that actually would believe him. He remembered that he had tried to tell his mother once, when she was still living with them. She knew he was telling the truth but blamed it on his condition. It was the worst night of his life, when his mother disbelieved him.

Well that was years and years ago. Adam hadn’t met his mother for nine years and counting. She had remarried to another man called Drake, and she seemed to be having a happy life, but she was across the sea and both of them were lacking in the financial department.

Adam looked by at the streets racing before him, and felt a tingle in his brain that was the only warning he would ever receive, and then everything became transparent and he was here, but he was also somewhere else.

He was back in 1975 again.