UNSTUCK IN TIME

Isaiah Sharp was a person unstuck in time, and he was the only one who knew it. He wasn’t sure how it had happened or why it happened to him, but he accepted it as just another absurdity in a world full of them. He was no longer bound by the linear progression of moments that most people took for granted. He could go back and forth in time, experiencing moments from his past and future as if they were all happening at once, but not of his own volition.
His first experience with this temporal chaos was on a brisk November morning. Sitting in his office, sipping coffee, he suddenly found himself no longer there. He was back in his childhood home, watching his younger self play with toy soldiers on the floor. The room felt so familiar, and yet, it had been decades since he’d last seen it.
Another time, he found himself transported to a moment later in his childhood. He was a young boy again, running through a field of tall grass, the sun warming his face. The world was filled with the simple joys of youth, and for a brief moment, he felt weightless.
Isaiah had no control over these leaps through time.
One moment, he’d be a teenager, reliving his first kiss in the pouring rain, and the next, he’d find himself on his wedding day, nervously awaiting his bride. It was as if he were flipping through the pages of his own life, like a choose-your-own-adventure book where he could only witness the random choices he had made.
There was only one constant in Isaiah’s life, a single, unchanging presence in the chaos of his temporal existence. That constant was Isaiah himself.
It was disorienting, to say the least, but Isaiah couldn’t help but find a strange beauty in it. He saw his life as a series of moments, strung together like beads on a cosmic necklace. Some were shining gems, like the birth of his children and the day he finally ran a marathon, and others were dull and forgettable, like the countless hours spent in front of a computer monitor.
As the years passed, Isaiah’s travels through time became more frequent and more chaotic. He found himself reliving moments of happiness and moments of pain, sometimes in quick succession. The past and the future blurred together, and it became increasingly difficult for him to distinguish between the two.
Until, one day, sitting on a porch swing and watching the sun dip below the horizon, Isaiah experienced a moment of profound stillness. He was neither in the past nor the future but in a timeless space of pure awareness. He felt a sense of peace and clarity that he had never experienced before. It was as if he had stepped outside of time itself, transcending the boundaries of his existence. He could feel the accumulated experiences and regrets of his life swirling around him. He thought of all the things he could have done differently, all the moments he might have cherished more.
In that moment, Isaiah realized that he was the only character in his story, but also the author of that story. He had been gifted the power to view his narrative from the outside in, to savor those seemingly arbitrary moments that time decided to show him. Time was no longer a prison but a gallery of experiences, and he was its sole visitor and participant.
With this newfound understanding, Isaiah began to navigate the currents of time with purpose and intention. He relished the moments of his life that brought him joy and found a way to let go of the moments that haunted him. He embraced the beauty of the present moment, knowing that it was the only moment that truly mattered.
And so, Isaiah Sharp, a man unstuck in time, lived a life full of moments, each one a pearl on a string, and he was content, for he had learned that in the end, it was the moments that mattered most.