Time Travelers

It's a fact of life that people will come and go from each of our lives. Many of these people arrive, stay a little, and leave without making too big of an impression on our lives. The harsh truth is that this is most of the people you will meet. People like Alex Harsh. I had to think for a while before I could remember his first name. The only reason he came up at all was because I wrote the word harsh and thought, "I knew someone with that last name. What was his name? He was a Boy Scout. Alex!" And with a quick search in Facebook, there he is! He looks the same, two kids, facial hair, AND five mutual friends! This is proof that he exists still or yet.

There are other people who have come and gone from my life and changed me in a way that I can see with little to no reflection. Take Ryan Esser for instance. At the age of 13, Ryan taught me to look past a person's appearance and give them a second shot. I was trying to be a jocky prep kid in seventh grade and wouldn't let a skater punk talk to me without calling him a loser. This was exactly Ryan's first impression of me. He walked up to me in the hall of Waseca Middle School and said, "Hey aren't you Damien and Dustin's brother?" or something like that. To which I responded like an asshole and said, "der der der der der, loser." We were very good friends a few months later. Thinking back on that, I'm so insanely embarrassed. Ryan died a few years back just a few days before his 28th birthday. It was one of the hardest times of my life.

There are other people who come into your life make and impression and then completely disappear. I call these people Time Travelers; mostly because I assume that they are actually time travelers. These people are much rarer than all other types of people. It is especially hard to disappear in these days with the internet and such, so the only possible explanations are Aliens or Time Travel. Saying that Aliens is the reason for these people is preposterous and so the only rational theory we are left with is Time Travel.

Let me tell you a story about Max Trotter. I first met Max in 8th grade. He was unpredictable to say the least. At a school dance he may or may not have lit a fire in one of the bathrooms. I heard he did, but also I never saw any evidence that he did. There were a lot of stories about his past. He showed up suddenly and so there were bound to be. I heard once or twice that he was from Chicago and got in with a gang and moved to small town Minnesota to hide out because probably he killed a guy. I was usually a pretty good kid and his reckless demeanor always made me a little uneasy. Throughout my early teen years Max would disappear and then randomly show up somewhere around town or in my class halfway through a trimester. (We had a trimester system in my school as opposed to quarters or semesters. So it was cut into three terms. I digress.)

The last time I ever saw Max Trotter was the perfect way to sum up everything I'm telling you about this guy probably from the future. Ryan Esser and I were cruising the mean streets of Waseca, MN when we saw a familiar face walking on the side of one of the main roads. You guessed it, Max Trotter. Naturally, we pulled over and he got in the back seat and sat right in the middle next to the boom box that was the car's stereo. He told us he needed to go to Vista Villa (The trailer park in Waseca). We started driving and Ryan asked Max where he had been. Max mostly shrugged off the question and reiterated that he needed to go to Vista Villa. A minute later Ryan had a knife to his neck and Max was saying just take me to Vista Villa. Where the hell does it look like we're going, was our general response. Somehow we got Max to calm down and put the knife away and we dropped him off at the trailer (Time Machine?) that he directed us to. We drove away and I never saw or heard from Max Trotter again.

A simple search on Facebook give little more than his signature on a cliff metaphorically speaking.