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I love my wife. We have been together for five years and you would think that if I had gotten so lucky, what would I be doing? But I am thinking of her, trapped in a parallel dimension whose only habitation is the mind of my best friend. Think about it. She is a part of who I am, or she was. The surface of time in which we all live is insubstantial, you might say, a mere mirage, an illusion on the surface of the mind.
My name is Ralph and I am an architect but for now I will call myself Alex. I am a professor at the University of Florida where I teach environmental design. I have a lovely wife and two wonderful daughters. A long time ago I was a roommate with a famous architect named Richard, who in turn spent time as a student with a man Richard calls simply "The Teacher," whose first name is John. I met The Teacher once and I will get to that shortly.
John is so brilliant that even today Richard calls him The Teacher, and even I call him by his title of honor: Dr. Borodin. At the time he was an advisor to a small cadre of students on the very leading edge of the then unknown field of physics. We had to keep quiet about our studies at the time because we were breaking onto new ground concerning the behavior of matter. Mr. Newton was long dead and his legacy long buried by the time we formed our little cabal and I believe Newton was a great man. I have nothing against him.
Yet even the greatest man can be wrong, and the truth is, if he had seen the things we saw then, I wonder if he would have gone so far on conjecture. Thomas Edison said to a reporter one day, "I know one can never be sure of anything, but it is damn sure that even a fool can be right more often than he can be wrong." Take it for what it's worth.
Richard became very concerned about the direction of our experiments and that we were playing with forces we did not understand. So we went on independent tracks. He turned his back to time travel and the study of the nature of space and I turned mine to the study on probability, that of which eventually led me to a solution to the problem of moving through time and space. Our paths crossed in the most intimate way two years ago when John came back to visit and caught sight of my experiments, which he said were far along. He was right.
Richard and I had a sort of falling out on both the philosophy and the ethics of what we were doing. John said some things to me that are still haunting me to this day. I will get to that shortly as well. There was a girl.
Her name was Lillian. She was my girlfriend in college. My wife's friend. She is a beautiful girl from a wealthy family. She is an empath. What does that mean? That means she understands you better than you understand yourself. We spent a lot of time together but she fell in love with my best friend, Michael, while I was abroad. I have always wondered how much of what happened to Lillian came from her and how much came from me.
I caught wind of the developing relationship and I rushed home to win her back. I don't know if I did. Michael is a writer. Like me, he is a writer for fiction, but Michael is a successful writer. I am a pseudo writer. I have written some articles for the local papers. I've had essays published in the local college paper. I have kept a journal since I was a child. People say I am a very good writer. Sometimes I start a story in my head that never gets recorded on paper, but I am not a writer like Michael.
I have many things I want to say just as much as Michael does, maybe more, but I have never even conceived of publishing a book. There are hundreds of stories floating around in my head, but I will never write them down. There isn't enough time to write everything down, and maybe that is the problem. I don't have the discipline to sit down and write everything down in haste.
I am a pseudo writer because I have never taken the time to write everything I have collected in my head. Michael didn't have the money to take the time to write everything he knows down, but still he is a writer. He is a writer because he has read so much, that he knows exactly what to say and how to say it. So to me he can be called a pseudo writer as well.
Hi emptyhole,
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