The pursuit of happiness.
She had known from the beginning that she could never live long enough to travel all the way back and complete her plan. Even were she to live to be a hundred she would still fall decades short. Then, when she found herself to be with child, she realised that this was her destiny and boarded a train.
She travelled as far as she could each day, blending into the background with her headphones plugged into the side of her head and an opened book on her knee, until the time to give birth neared whereupon she took a break.
She placed a bet on a horse race, after checking the handwritten notes in the notebook she carried, and won the deposit for a rented flat. She gave birth to a child, a boy, and spent a few years of the few decades through which she’d previously traveled raising him, telling him how special he was to be, what he must do and how he must do it. Then, once sure he understood, she took him on a train.
She’d eventually died, many years ago in the future, leaving her son alone to grow old and to complete the journey, the mission, that she had begun.
His experience of time travel having been begun in the womb, the young man traversed the years far more easily than his mother had. Her crippling disorientation had meant bouts of travel be confined to a few hours at a time with plenty of breaks. The boy found he had no such problem and furthermore could make sense of the distorted world around him, allowing him to engage in conversation and interact with his environment. It took mammoth concentration and he occasionally stuttered or forgot something that had happened, but generally he forgot before it had happened and remembered that he’d forgotten later when it occurred.
“Don’t make friends,” his mother had told him, “it will only make thing’s harder when the time comes.”
But he couldn’t help it. He loved people. He loved chatting to them, watching them, being around them and, for the most part, he found people quite liked him, too.
But his mother had, as mothers have a habit of being, been right.
The young man did as the young have a habit of doing. He became old, an old man with a million memories. Memories of things that have yet to pass, of folk yet to be born, of smiles yet to be smiled. Many times on his journey he had paused and wondered what would happen if he was selfish, if he just stopped, maybe met a lover and got married. After a journey back of this length maybe he could live out his life before the ever accelerating tsunami of ecocatastrophe made it’s way back to his new past. But, he knew, even if he did then, eventually the tsunami would wash by and re-write his selfish happiness into suffering.
Ultimately, the last time traveller realised, the pursuit of happiness was futile.
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