The Girl Who Saw Time

A short (but maybe not so short) story I am working on. About a girl, Nayeli who has the gift of Time Sight. Meaning she has the ability to manipulate her view of Time Energy. 

The sun is warm on my back and I have to take a moment and close my eyes to soak up this delicious first Spring feeling. Grandma always said to take in each moment as it is happening because it's gone in an instant. It may sound a little silly- a 25 year-old still calling upon her grandmother's advice but hey, what can I say? She was a smart lady. I opened my eyes again and looked down to the sketch pad in my lap. I really do love sketching. I mainly just do pencils.

I am in my favorite spot.  Take a right as you reach the end of my street and then head north on I53 for about 20 minutes and you'll find yourself at a fork. If you go left you'll head into town where you'll find everything a suburban house wife might want. However, if you go left, which no one ever does these days, you'll find yourself on a dusty dirt road. And if you're brave enough to stay on that for about 6 miles you'll wind up and around a small cliff where, once at the top, you can overlook and see the whole town. It's a little secret that not many people know about aside from myself.

So yeah. I come up here to sketch. To think. To breathe. To be.

However, it seems at this particular moment that my thoughts and being are being interrupted by a rather loud Chevy rolling up the path and parking next to my green Jeep Wrangler. A young woman steps out of the driver seat, I look but I don't see anyone in her passenger seat. She has those silly sunglasses on that chicks are wearing these days. You know, the really large and plastic-y looking ones that cover up just about all of your cheeks? She walks up to me and asks, "Is this not the way to the Grand Mall?" I looked back at her and then glanced at her plates. Out of state. Figures. I smile up at her and shake my head, "No.  You should have gone right at the fork about 6 miles back. " I hear her quietly curse under her breath. She smiles back at me but her eyes linger on my sketch pad. She walks up to get a closer look. This annoys me but I was taught to be polite. She bends over and looks as though she seriously considers my drawing. It takes her a second but she looks from the sketch pad and then down at the town. She does this a couple of times until she looks up at me and says, "Ohhh. I get it. You're drawing the landscape as if the town wasn't there. I bet it looked like that 1,000 years ago! Before the 'white man.' " She says the last two words while using quotations in the air, as if to not offend me. I smile and say "More like 827 years but you're close!" She smiles again, clearly unsure of what to do with my failed attempt at a joke. I clear my throat and say "But yeah, like I said, go right at the fork this time." She thanks me and heads back to her car. I watch her off and then return to my sketch. I look from the townscape to my paper a few times and wonder to myself, "If only people could see what I see."

I guess now's a good a time as any to fill you in. I'm a Seer. Please don't confuse that with a psychic for I am nothing of the sort. It's more like... well. I can see the flow of time. I'll just let that sink in for a second. Yes. I can manipulate my visualization to see the flow of time; meaning I can look at a building and concentrate on its time vortex energies and then just sort of... bend their appearance. I can see, more or less, go visually back in time or visually forward in time. Now, I know what you're thinking, "Oh, my God! She can travel through space/time!" No. No I cannot. Nothing I touch or am around can travel through or in the space time continuum. Trust me. I've tried.

What it basically boils down to is this: I can be looking at an elderly person and kind of visually tick the clock back. It looks really neat actually. They just appear to be ageing backwards. It's marvelous to watch the years literally melt off of people. To see them in their prime again. I can do it the other way as well. I can be looking at a twenty-something and visually turn the clock forward however many years I want and see what they might look like when they're older.

I've learned that there are a few rules to this. My ability to do this does not affect the person at all. They can neither see nor feel or sense what I am doing in any way. It has no negative (or positive) effects on this world. At least none that we've happened upon thus far. It's not an exact science.

Now. You see. Something I learned the hard way is that just because I can take a young healthy person and age them in my mind to 80 or 90 does not mean that they will make it to that age. I know this because I had used it on both of my parents. And well. My father passed away when I was 10. He was only 41. I had seen him as an old man more than a few times.

When I use my gift on living entities I have discovered that you can neither age nor de-age them outside of their lifespan parameters. Meaning, a butterfly, only lives for about 14 days. I cannot visually age a butterfly much past those 14 days. It just kind of stops. Like it's capped off. The energy doesn't exist for it, you see so there is no way a Seer could perceive it. They kind of just turn into a fossil. But only if the elements allow such an entity to fossilize. If that makes any sense. Are you bearing with me?

Now. Let me give you a little history. I've  been able to do this for as long as I can remember. When I was a young child I hadn't learned to control it. I would cry because my parents would lift me up to their faces but all I saw was the face of an elderly person whom I did not recognize. My parents took me to a least half a dozen optimologists convinced there was something wrong with my vision and that I needed corrective lenses of some kind. (20/20 by the way. In case you were wondering.) It wasn't until I was 7 or 8 that it kind of started to make sense to me. That I was able to  begin reasoning and rationalizing. It had scared me so badly as a very young child that I almost didn't get past it.

I have this very vivid memory, one day I was in the basement with my father. He was always down there working on some project or another. Well on this particular day he had happened to be working on this clock, one that he had been tinkering with for well over a month.  An heirloom of my mother's family passed down for a few generations. She was heartbroken when it had suddenly and quite inexplicably had just stopped ticking. But my father, ever the handyman, said he could fix it. And so he set to it. He'd spend hours down there banging away. Occasionally I could hear the low rumble of a curse word floating up the stairs as he smashed his thumb for the umpteenth time.

Anyway. On this particular afternoon I was hanging out in his workshop with him, just keeping him company. When he finally fixed the clock! I remember sitting there, across the workbench and I had just happened to be looking right at the clock when it started ticking again. I yelled out, "Daddy! Daddy! Look! You fixed it!" He froze in place but I watched his eyes follow mine and land right on the hands of the clock and stare in astonishment as it ticked away "tick, tock, tick, tock, tick..." on it went. He dropped whatever tool had been in his hand and ran to the bottom of the stairs and joyously yelled for my mother, "Melody! Melody!! I've done it! I'VE DONE IT!! Come down here, quickly!" I listened as I heard footsteps along the floors above me and waited to hear her come barreling down the stairs as she so often did. And then, there she was. A heap of crazy curls streaming behind her as she took the stairs two at a time and landed square in my father's arms. He swept her over to me at the work bench. We were one big pile of smiles and giggles. And then a hush came over us. We held our collective breaths as we watched and listened. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock... And on it went. I remember looking up at my mother after a while, because she was the first to break the silence. With a gasp. My father and I looked at her. Watched as she shed a tear. As graceful as graceful is.

I will never forget the look in my parents faces. And the words my father said to me, {"You see, Eli, anything is possible. You just have the strength to persevere through and the wisdom to know what is worth fighting for."} It was then, in that moment, looking from my mother to my father who were grinning at each other like teenagers, that I knew I had the strength to overcome my fear of my curse. I closed my eyes and focused their energy. When I opened them again I saw my parents as the elderly grandparents I hoped that they both would turn into one day. But no fear remained. They were still my parents. They were still grinning at each other. And then at me. I closed my eyes again. I opened them and my parents were exactly as they should be. That was the last day I referred to it as a curse and from that day on I called it my gift.