1990

I won my magic phone in a storage locker auction a few months ago but it feels like years.
Yes, it’s magic. And no, I don’t know where it came from. It was the only thing in the locker.
It looks like a regular smartphone but the cool thing is it’s a time machine.
I’ve used it to go back and forward in time, but to be honest I was too scared to go too far into the future, afraid the world might not be there and I’d never make it back.
I know what you’re thinking. A magic time travel phone?
Maybe it’s from the future but it’s a magic phone to me.
It’s got a few other apps but the time travel one was too tempting.
And Christy was too gorgeous.
Only she wasn’t. No one is, not even Christy, a great girl who, with my help of course, spawned the destroyer of planet Earth, if you believe things like heraldic angels descending.
Actually it wasn’t her fault at all. She was just gifted with one of the most relentlessly spectacular bodies I had ever seen with a face that knocked me for a loop.
Everything that’s happening right now is because of me, because I couldn’t leave 1990, and Christy, alone.
It took me four tries. Three do-overs until I happened on the right order of words to get her to go out with me.
Or whatever it took, it finally worked and we clicked.
And we basically fell into bed, and we didn’t use a condom, and it was amazing, and neither of us ever did anything like that before, blah blah. It’s true, though. Neither of us had ever ruined all of reality before.
Actually I don’t know about that. About the “all” part. Maybe we only screwed up our slice of reality.
Like it matters. It was the only reality we had, so we may as well have broken all of it.
So I’m gonna try to go back again. To 1990. To Christy. To fix it. To stop it from happening.
You see, it’s us. Me and Christy. Our specific combination of genetic codes is one of those things with a big red slash through it. If we put our pictures into an “our baby’s face” machine it would look like Hitler.
For whatever reason, my shit plus her shit equals… I don’t even want to tell you. Like, the literal worst person ever. Like a major problem child who grows up to do unthinkably stupid, destructive things. On a global scale. “Eco-Anarchists” they’ll call themselves, and he’ll be the first and worst one.
So me and her is bad. Seriously can’t ever happen bad.
I don’t know what I’ll say to her. Maybe if I get to her before I got to her I can lead her away or distract her. Just enough to make me miss her that first time.
Then none of this will have happened. So here goes.
“The Foley’s in Tucson in 1990 where I met Christy.”
I won this magic phone in a storage locker auction a few months ago but it feels more like years.
Yeah, time travel gets confusing.