My future self was standing anxiously at the door. At least I was pretty sure it was my future self because I would have remembered traveling to the future and meeting myself now. Time travel was not common enough that I forget trips. I...he banged on my door a second time before I shrugged and opened the door. I was regretting opening it already, little good could come from this.
"There better be a meteor or a robot uprising coming." I said to the future me. His hair was cut short and seemed a bit harrowed. There were no new lines and no red beard flecked with gray. He couldn't be much older than me.
"There's no need to be snippy." He walked right past me and moved quickly towards my bedroom. "I have to find grandma's necklace. It's still in the dresser right?"
"What?" I ran up behind him and watched as he ruffled through my sock drawer. "You came from the past to steal my stuff?"
"You're going to lose it anyway. Always misplacing things, but I can actually put it to use. It will show Shawna I'm serious."
"Shawna?"
"You'll meet her next year. She's amazing and we love her...I love her, whatever. We had a fight and I was going to give her the necklace to show her I'm serious about this. But it was gone. I looked everywhere so I must have lost it...you must have. So I came back here." He growled in frustration, throwing the last of my socks on the ground and not finding the necklace. He moved to the next drawer.
I figured trying to overpower my future self would cause real damage so letting him throw clothes on the floor was a lesser evil. "And you think giving her a necklace is going to save things? This sounds a lot like the webcams to try to sustain my relationship with Nguyen. I don't really like the idea of starting up another nightmare relationship. Are you sure I will know what I'm doing when I'm you?"
He looked back at me with an expression I recognized from the mirror many times and I could almost imagine that tight pain like a hand squeezing around his heart. "Shawna...I just have to be better, I'll show her I'm better, that I'm not messy or childish. The necklace is important, it will help her understand."
I felt that sensation now too. Shawna was a stranger but Nguyen could clamp around my heart still when I wasn't careful. "And you figure I lost the necklace so you'd come get it first? Isn't it obvious? If you couldn't find it and come back to take it from me now, then you're the reason you couldn't find it in the first place.
He paused, fist around the jewelry case that housed our grandmother's necklace which I'd tossed in my shorts drawer after Nguyen returned it. "Oh. That does make sense. But I hadn't come back yet. Maybe I lost it for real at first and this becomes the new reason. I'll have to ask Brandon." He shook his head. "It doesn't matter, I can't risk not finding it."
He tapped his chrono band and vanished to the future along with the necklace.
I surveyed the area. My sock and underwear drawers were savaged and the necklace apparently wouldn't exist for at least a year. But my future self's words about Shawna worried me the most. Nguyen on the whole had left me devastated. Was I really going to make all those same mistakes?
It wasn't necessarily certain. It could be some potential future or it could be set in stone. Brandon could cite some tensor equations to explain but that wouldn't do much good. All I could do is try to avoid anyone named Shawna, or maybe she was worth it and all I ever wanted. Either way it doesn't seem like I'm getting wiser with age. He could have at least given me some pointers or a 'good luck' before he blinked back to the future. I hope I don't actually become that rude when I'm in his shoes.
**************
I had this random idea of a person stealing from their past self and not understanding the irony at work today and it sort of fleshed out into this short bit and I really need to actually start putting these things somewhere. I was thinking at first I would only put Winter Melody related things here but that sort of fell through and I'd like to stretch out a bit more.
This became a mostly self contained little blip and is far too short to even call a short story. The term flash fiction is used sometimes for things less than 1000 words. The story feels a little bare bones but padding can be disadvantageous too.
