In case you were curious

Here's a map! Each story-bit is in one location. Collect them all!

And yes, this is a project. A project, with which you, the public space user, are involved. Please comment?

What to do

Dear fellow time-travelers,

By now you've found one of the power-up boxes, and the text inside. On each card is a bit of a story. Collect them all here, or around campus!

Below you will find the rest of the story.

I ask that you please comment on the post of the section of story that you have. Leave anything you'd like - opinion, insult, analysis, whatever. Ultimately, this is an experiment, and your posts are my data. Thanks for being an unwilling test subject!


..and enjoy.

Epilogue

Would he ever understand it?
Time stops in suffering.
How long would it take to heal?

1.

And then it was over – all that he had feared and planned had passed. He had nearly missed it. And in its place Tim felt a weight fall from him, replaced with a lightness that seemed wrong, guilty. Alone again in his room, the silence accused him of everything in the way she had not.

2.

Does a beloved exist only in the mind or heart of the lover?

Tim could never know, but he did know that the answer was so near, too near to touch.

3.

Sitting beneath the highway overpass, they huddled close together in the fall night. Cars sped by them, on route to new places. Headlights. Taillights. Eventually the lights blurred with the silent sunrise.
He depended on her for stillness and silence; without her, life had been too noisy and fast.

4.

They went to the concert together and danced in time with the music. That night in bed he would have kissed her if he hadn’t caught a cold.
He got out of the bed, out of the tangle of arms and legs, and slept on the couch.
He was certain that to take a risk was a finality he could not endure.

5.

In her way she was perfect: she lived slowly. But he knew: he could not undo the mistakes he had made, the already missed opportunities.

6.

Most of all Tim wished he could live in the present.

7.

What passed between them was something like optimism. A tremendous mass. The gravity pulled them closer to it, but not each other. They circled it together. Understanding, but not.

8.

Some moments he felt as if he, his Self, were the melody of a song that had just changed from a minor to major key. They were sacred and he guarded them.

9.

In a dream once, Tim could stop time. And when he did, he did so to undo his mistakes. To protect her. And when he did, the key that he had used to open her heart locked it again with a click and returned to Tim’s hand.

10.

She resting on a blanket in the grass. He running, late for class. He tried to stop time: she could enjoy the sun, the grass, forever, and maybe in that time he could find a way to enjoy it with her.