BUT WHERE FROM HERE?

The Barn Swallows would arrive by mid to late April each year. I always loved the season they would bring, the warmer summer months that would soon follow.

I grew up with open fields and the rich colors of Washington State in a town called Palouse two miles from the border of Idaho with my parents and older brother. My father was a farmer and provided most of our family’s income from the abundance of wheat he and his hired farming staff would harvest every year. My mother was a speech therapist who worked independently with a clinical management consultant firm about three days a week. My brother, Michael whom I called Mic, was older than me by three and a half years. I don’t have a single recollection of sibling rivalry; We were best friends since the day I was born. A friendship unimpeded until the day he would die. We didn’t grow up with cable television, our parents thought it would inhibit our imagination and so we would instead spend our days playing underneath the cinnamon colored Yellow Pines near our fathers' barn when it wasn’t raining. When the rains would come, we would nestle ourselves inside our fathers' barn in between the stacks of wheat bundles and barrels of seed. Our laughter, always consuming, saving us from boredom.

When I was nine years old, I learned of injustice and the killing of no reason. I remember playing with Mic near our fathers’ barn finding sticks that would be used as our weapons in fighting the evil aliens that would soon attack. We were distracted by a ruckus of violent chirping outside near the arch of the barn. We placed our sticks on the ground and walked over to better understand the commotion. Mic and I stood in silence watching three large crows harass our family of swallows. Two of the crows were on the ground restraining both the mother and father swallow separately while the third ripped and shredded open the nest full of baby swallows. I didn’t know what was happening at the time. I didn’t understand the incentive of action. I looked at Mic. His face was stoic and emotionless. I could tell that he didn’t understand what was happening either.

I asked him, “Are those raven birds?”

Contemplating momentarily in silence, he thought to himself and then responded, “Hmm, I think they’re crows. Their beaks are straight.”

“I’ve never seen a crow before, Mic.” I said.

His eyebrows began to furrow and his stoicity turned to anger. “They don’t live around here typically. I don’t know why they’re here now. They’re killing the family of swallows.”

I looked up at him again and heard him whisper, “Why?”

He picked up a rock and threw it at the large crow near the nest of babies but missed. The rock landed near the crow on the ground who had been pining the father swallow hostage against the barn wall. The crow jumped as the rock landed near his wingspan which allowed for the swallow to break free and fly upward to rescue his babies, but, right as the swallow made it to the top of the barn the nest fell to the ground. The crow had killed the babies with his beak and the impact of the fall ensured their death. The father swallow flew to the nest as soon as it dropped and the murderous crow then flew to find the other crow that had cowardly hopped away. The third crow that had been pinning the mother swallow then followed his comrades. His violent force in pinning her against the wall exhausted her and had killed her too. Because of Mic’s rock, the crows flew away. Mic and I stood there in silence as we watched the father swallow fly between his nest of dead babies and his now dead partner. As little as the swallow was, I could feel his panic. I could feel his sorrow.

When Mic was twenty-two he received a scholarship to study architecture at the prestigious Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. I had found interest in clothing design and decided to follow him to LA in pursuit of a career in fashion. We lived together near Little Tokyo in a quaint two bedroom apartment nestled by North Broadway and Spring Street. Our lives together were filled with ongoing excitement from a city unfamiliar. Our friends co-mingled and our sibling bond only grew stronger throughout time.

After our studies, both Mic and I decided to continue living in LA as the city was rich in work opportunity for both of our careers. When Mic was twenty-seven, he fell in love with a woman named Liz, a fellow architect, who he had met through mutual friends. Mic and Liz rented an apartment together near Venice Beach and it became one of my favorite weekly traditions to shop at the Venice farmers market Saturday morning and bring fresh produce and ingredients to their place to cook dinner. I, myself, developed my career working for a high end fashion designer as a garment technologist where I would test new combinations of yarns and various textiles. I loved the idea of being associated with the fashion industry - something that entertained my more artistic, younger-self fantasies working within what I’m passionate about.

“Doing what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” People would tell me.

As I got older, in my thirties, it was only then that I could look back and begrudge the fact that people should have instilled in me that money does in fact buy happiness. Passion is cool but passion can’t buy you shit. That’s just one of the things I had to learn on my own but I forgave society's ill teachings and simply just learned to rely on myself for adequate information on how life really is. I’m fortunate enough to have learned the truth regarding how to properly take care of myself in a city as expensive and exorbitantly priced as LA. I had content as a garment technologist. I could pay my bills and I could keep moving forward. “That is all I can ask for.” I would constantly tell myself.

When Mic and I were in our mid to late thirties, our mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Our parents were retired and still living in the same house where Mic and I grew up. They never had dreams of moving to a big, loud and dirty city like Mic and I did. It was stage three cancer by the time they had found it and she was instructed to pursue treatments of chemotherapy. My father was retired and was able to take care of her and ensure that she made it to-and-from her treatment therapy everyday. Mic and I hated being away from our parents at this time and would call to check up on Mom every other day. Towards the end of her treatment, the doctors had informed us that the cancer cells had died and that the cancer had shrunk significantly since the diagnosis. Mic and Liz made plans to visit Mom and Dad for a long weekend. I decided to follow suit.

The day of our flight, I sat working on some personal emails in my studio apartment. The sunny Californian spring day brought fresh air and sunlight into the room and I felt a rush of anxiety that I was pushing my time too far out, wondering if LA traffic could perhaps make me miss my morning flight. I looked at the clock on my microwave that sat across the room from me and saw that it read 10.45. “Dang it!” I thought to myself. I was supposed to be out the door by 10:30. I need to leave now.

I gathered my things, closed my laptop, put on my shoes next to the front door and grabbed my one rolling suitcase. As I walked outside, I ordered an Uber to take me to LAX. Frustrated at my lack of timing, I knew I needed to have ordered this Uber minutes ago. I pushed the button to order my Uber and saw that it was only minutes away.

“Ok, that’s good.” I thought to myself.

As I got into the Uber I said hi to my driver, Sal, and looked at his clock above the radio. 10:33 it read.

“Hmm, Sal might want to fix his clock.” I thought to myself.

I took a breath and trusted I would make it to the airport in time. "Mic and Liz are on my same flight. We’ll probably even have time to share a beer together before we board. Alright, I’ll stop worrying." I thought to myself.

As my Uber and I pulled up to the curb for departures, I saw Mic and Liz rolling their suitcases towards the automatic sliding doors.

I shouted, “Hey Mic!” As I stepped onto the curb and they both turned to look my direction.

“Random and perfect timing.” Mic said with a smile.

The three of us had bought our tickets together and arranged to sit next to each other - I took the window seat because Liz likes the option of being able to get up whenever she wants without bothering us so therefore my incredibly generous brother, without hesitation, took the middle seat. As we sat together waiting for take off, I looked at my phone one last time before I turned it off and saw the time say 8:45. I stared at the time and had a moment of utter confusion.

“Have I lost my mind?” I thought to myself.

I looked over at Mic and asked, “What time is our flight supposed to depart?”

He turned his head toward me and said, “Now, 8:45.”

I nodded my head and he chuckled under his breath with eyes full of love. His mouth was turned into a slight smile as he looked down at his lap again, reading his book.

I was so confused. If my clocks were wrong this morning then how on earth did I make it to the airport in time? Maybe I have some kind of incredible intuition for timing. That is so weird. Weird, weird, weird. At least I made my flight.

By the time we arrived at our parents house it was 4am. Liz was exhausted so she went to bed and I pulled Mic aside.

“Mic, why is time going backwards? What the hell is happening?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?” He asked, sincerely confused.

“When we left the airport today, it was 8:45am and now it’s 4am. Time is going backwards. We’re moving toward yesterday. Have I lost my mind?” I said.

“But that’s not time going backwards, that’s time going forward.” Mic responded.

“But we’re going back in time now?” I asked.

“We’re not going back in time. This day hasn’t happened yet.” Mic said.

“But it has! Today is moving closer to yesterday, Mic!” I said as I started to get worked up.

“Look, I’m really tired and I don’t know what to tell you. I’m sorry. Just get some sleep.” Mic said as he kissed the side of my head and walked into his old bedroom.

Time is going backwards. What the actual hell?

It didn’t take me long after this conversation to realize that something had happened to the entire world but nobody was cognizant of it. I am the only one who can remember everything that has happened in the past. I know that we are moving backwards about to re-live everything from our youth. We no longer are getting older in the way of our bodies slowly decomposing rather we are getting younger and death now is symbolized by reverting back to becoming a baby. And nobody knows this except me, it seems. Every time I asked a stranger or called a friend or brought this up at a social event prior to our trip visiting mom and dad - nobody knew what I was talking about.

The day that we flew to be with mom and dad for the weekend was May 20th 2020. Nobody can tell me a single recollection of their life beyond this date. Meaning when I ask them what they did in August of 2020, they can’t remember. When I ask them if they think that’s weird that they can’t remember their life "before" May 20th 2020 - the same response is, “Nobody knows what happened before that date; it’s not a big deal; That’s just how life is.” I’m perplexed.

We’re all going back in time and I’m the only one who knows this. I’m the only one who can now see the past - or according to everyone else in this world - the future. I can see the future.

The troubling part is that I have no records of ever existing in, say, 2010. My thoughts are that perhaps the day that time reversed, our computer systems had a massive malfunction unable to comprehend the miraculous shift in Time. Email still worked and we still had technology but it seemed as though all public and private documents and records were erased. All data cleared prior to May 20th so nobody knows what actually happened.

It wasn’t until I died that my energy travelled to a new dimension and I was presented with the answers. On May 20th 2020, our entire polyverses’ existence shifted its paradigm. This came as a result from what humans on Earth knew as The Big Bang Theory. When the universe expanded itself creating its bang, a residual sonic wave, if you will, followed. The initial impact was felt in the form of a bang. The velocity of the bang was able to travel much faster through space which impacted planet Earth a couple millennia before the wave could reach the planet. As the wave traveled through space it manipulated the fourth dimension - Time - and as the wave hit planet Earth, on May 20th 2020, Time then reversed. The way that humans experienced Time, aside from their digital clocks, sundials and conformed understanding (in order to organize civilization), was with entropy. Entropy is the gradual decline into disorder. Which is why humans before May 20th 2020 would die of old age. Since the day we were born, our bodies began moving through the stages of decline. From the day we were born, we would move closer to death. That is because our molecular biology moved forward in the way of decline. But when the wave hit Earth on May 20th 2020, the fourth dimension reverted every living organisms molecular biology into the reverse which is negentropy. So any human [and living creature on Earth] alive on May 20th 2020 miraculously had their biology converted to negentropy. Instead of our bodies getting older and decomposing, we got younger until our infantile stage wouldn’t allow us to keep living and breathing on Earth. Hospice was filled with what I called “Premature babies” in need of a mother’s womb. But when I would reference that terms in conversation while still alive on planet Earth, nobody understood what I was talking about.

I never fully understood why I was the only living person on Earth who could remember the past. I never fully understood why I was the only one who knew that we were going back in time. But when I died, I found that answer as well. I was born with a fractured Unigmatic split. If humans were able to live for another millenium, they would have been able to understand theodynamic energy which is the energy that we are genetically predisposed with when we are born. Each individual had a specific sequence chain within their DNA where the unigmatic structures connected to each other and provided information on how exactly the theodynamic energy could travel once the organism died.

My unigmatic molecular chain had a rare split and I could therefore understand the paradigm shift.

I was the only living human on planet Earth at this time who had this split which explains why I was the only human able to understand that time began moving in the reverse. People who had existed in times before my generation also had that rare split too but they had already died before it ever affected their daily life. The split wasn’t really a bad thing or changed who we were as humans, it was just a random outlier within certain living organisms molecular biology.

The unigmatic molecular chains in living organisms were too small and undetectable for any human researching quantum mechanics/physics and theory in the year 2020. If they were able to discover ways of finding the unigmatic molecular structure they would have been able to discover the energy form known as theodynamics which is the energy that allows for your kilojoules to transmit and travel into other objects and back into the fifth dimension and beyond post death. Never having discovered this, this is why we could never explain what happened after we died and that is also why there was so much controversy over the understanding of God. I could go into explaining ‘God’ to you now also… but wouldn’t you rather hear what happened to the rest of Mic’s and my life instead?

When Mic, Liz and I returned home from visiting our parents that weekend in May, I sat down with Mic, just the two of us, and explained to him about the reversal of time. I didn’t have any evidence proving it to him but I told him to trust me and within time I ensured him that I would be able to predict what would happen. I could tell him how and why things happened when they happened. He believed me. The two of us felt like secret super heroes, able to understand what would happen before it happened. But here’s the tricky thing: you’d think we would have been able to make a fortune with the stock market and lottery tickets but that wasn’t possible. Technology continued to exist but so did free will. Because humans maintain their capability of free will, the future was in a way re-written. The stock market did not exactly emulate everything it had done prior to May 2020, it only just kept responding to what the market was doing at the time. Since there were changes being made on a daily basis by humans, in time, the stock market and world economies changed. 2008 did not experience a recession because humans had acquired wisdom leading up to 2020 that they were able to apply to economics in 2008. The closer we got to resorting back to an infant, the more wisdom we would lose. Alzheimers became obsolete but in a way was replaced by the loss of wisdom. If a human did suffer with Alzheimers leading up to May 2020, their disease only diminished as time moved forward. Forward meaning in reverse from my perspective. Meaning their Alzheimers went away and their brain became sharp again.

This was one of the most defining pieces of evidence I could present to Mic in order for him to believe me. The winter of 2019 when our mother was diagnosed with Breast cancer, I told Mic that because time is now in the reverse, I can ensure that mom’s cancer would go away completely and it did. Our bodies used to grow old and decompose. But now our bodies grow stronger in youth everyday until we become babies. In time, he believed me and from there we had a lot of fun recreating our actions within certain situations once as we got to re-live them.

The year that I turned nine, the weather was particularly warm and the swallows had come to nest early. Mic and I sat in the living room together while entertaining ourselves with separate activities. I sat on the floor with my colored pencils spread out in front of me coloring designs onto the clothes in my coloring book. I was able to punch out the clothes from perforated outlines once I was finished coloring them in order to folder them onto the paper dolls that came with my book. I could dress them with my designs as I see fit. This coloring book was always one of my favorites. Mic sat at the coffee table working on homework. I looked out the window and saw a crow sitting perched on the tree branch just outside.

“Hey, Mic, wanna go outside and play? It doesn’t look like it’s going to rain.” I said.

Mic put his pencil down and said, “Yeah!”

We put on our shoes near the back door and walked over to the side of Dad’s barn.

“Maybe we should find some sticks to defend humankind from the evil aliens that are approaching.” I insisted.

“Good idea.” Mic said as he immediately started searching the ground for weapons.

I kept my eyes open looking for the three crows that I knew were nearby. I couldn’t find them. But I knew they were close and I knew what Mic and I needed to do.

“Hey Mic, remember when I told you that story about the crows killing the family of swallows near Dad’s barn?” I asked.

Picking up a small branch Mic answered, “What crows?”

“When we were younger and living in LA, I told you about the time we watched the three crows kill the family of swallows.” I reminded him.

He stopped what he was doing and looked at me. “Yeah I remember that. Is that what happened today?” He asked.

“I think so. I think they’re nearby now.” I said.

“Where do you think they are now?” Mic asked.

I responded, “I don’t know but let’s go find the swallows.”

He and I walked over to the side of the barn where the mother and father swallows were sitting quietly with their nest. A crow landed to our side and began walking up to the barn. Fearless, like he owned the place. Mic and I watched him in silence. I turned around behind us and saw the other two crows sitting up in the tree above us watching and waiting. This is it. Here they are.

“The other two are in the tree behind us.” I said.

Mic turned around to see them sitting, watching. He quietly leaned down and grabbed a rock that laid next to his feet.

“I’ll try to get the crow that attacks the nest. You want to take the two that hold the parents back?” He asked.

I leaned down and picked up a rock that rested next to my feet and said, “Yeah.” I had a heart full of vengeance.

Before we could further plan, the crow nearest us flew up and toward the nest. The other two crows flew next to the nest as well in hopes of singling out the parent swallows. Mic threw his rock with the best of his aim - he was prepared this time - and struck one of the crows really hard. The crow plummeted to the ground and the other two crows began screeching at the sudden death of their mate. One of the crows flew down to the ground to console the lifeless crow. I took off my sweater and used it to help me trap him. Mic through rock after rock at the crow near the nest until he struck its wing and it fell to the ground unable to keep flying. Mic ran to the injured bird and grabbed it with his hands pinning its wings down to his side and holding him steady. The crow was panicking. The other crow watched me get closer and realized it was being cornered into the side of the barn. I casted my sweater upward and as he started to expand his wings to fly away, the wall of the barn inhibited him from being able to fly quickly and I was able to throw my sweater over the top of him and then grab him with my hands. With wings pinned to their sides, Mic and I had them trapped. They couldn’t move. They could only just communicate with each other in shrieks and crow language.

“What do we do now?” Mic asked

“We kill them, Mic.” I said.

Mic nodded his head ‘yes.’ “Do you want to go first?” He asked.

“Yeah, but turn your crow first so he can watch.” I said.

Mic faced his crow towards mine and held him firmly ensuring he wouldn’t be able to escape. I steadied my crow with my sweater over the top of him. Exposed his face so that his friend could make eye contact, took my rock in my hand, extended my arm as high above my head as I could and threw it at his head. Mic’s crow screamed in anger as I repeatedly picked up the bloody rock again and again smashing in the crows head. Blood had splattered all over my dress. It somehow got up to my elbows and I was out of breath. I looked up and saw the family of swallows above us resting in peace. They were safe from the stone throwing and murderous crows. I looked at my brother as I sat on the ground panting. As I looked him in the eyes, no words were exchanged for a moment. Silence. Except for the panicking crow held captive underneath Mic’s grip.

“What should we do with him?” Mic asked.

“Let’s put him in one of the cage's Dad has in the barn. We’ll keep him here alive and mourning next to his dead family.” I answered.

And that’s exactly what we did. We kept him captive and sitting there for days while the other crows began rotting away. We would catch worms and feed them to him to keep him alive until one morning we found the cage had been opened and black feathers were spread out across the entire area. Mic thinks a fox came and ate him during the night. Whatever it was, he deserved his death and everything that came before.