The Journal

Being a “superhuman” sucks.

Alright, that may sound over dramatic, but let me explain.

When I first discovered I could do things others could only dream of, I was excited. Of course l was. I was a dumb fourteen-year-old who didn't understand what “kronomantic tendencies” meant. Let alone the implications of that. The two words stamped on my brand new government assigned ID felt like a message to the world, screaming “I’M SPECIAL!” But they were more like the diagnosis of a chronic illness. Or maybe a sentencing.

After that, the world began to slow down, and not in the way people say, offhandedly, when talking about peaceful or dull periods of their life. I mean literally.

I think it was water I noticed first, the way liquids seemed oddly thicker. Then it was speech. I got frustrated so easily at the amount of time it takes people to get a full sentence out of their mouths. My mother commented once, when I was barely fifteen, on how I spoke so fast they couldn’t keep up half the time.

Then it was everything from computers to rollercoasters, animals to transport. Walking to school I could make it there before the school bus had made half its rounds. Sitting on it was like torture. It forced me to watch the landscape slide by at snails pace for what felt like hours and bored me out of my mind. You wouldn’t believe how much of the world relies on time.

Doctors and specialists were never quite sure how to categorise me, not really. See, from their perspective, I move with superhuman speed, performing tasks in the blink of an eye, but from my perspective the rest of the world has been slowing ever so slightly each day. Either I have a form of uncontrollable super speed or a form of uncontrolled time manipulation? I’m not sure we’ll ever know.

Honestly, either way I’m screwed.

At least I don’t need to eat, and I age according to your time stream not mine, so I’m not about to vanish, or die, or anything, but there’s not much I can really do here.

I lost contact with my parents and brother about four years ago. I know it was four years ago because that’s what your calendars say. Feels like a lifetime. It was just too difficult to try to communicate with people who could only understand you if you sounded every word out over what feels like five minutes but what to them is a second. After all, by the time I was nineteen they couldn’t see my face because of it. Even now I’m in this room but I don’t know how you’ll perceive me. Perhaps as a sort of strange blur or moving shape? You look like a statue to me, the only way I can tell you’ve moved is when I go away and come back you’ve changed position.

Anyway, that’s not the reason I came here. I need your help. And I’m not even sure if you’ll be able to help me. The worst thing about perceiving time differently to everyone else, is the loneliness. I live completely apart from the world, just observing. It’s a bit like living just behind reality, able to see the real world but not touch it. You become the only person in your whole world.

The real reason I came here, the reason I need your help, I think there’s something else here with me. I think it’s following me. I keep seeing something moving in the corner of my eye, something that moves away to fast for me to see it. That should be impossible.

I don’t even know if you’ll be able to help by the time you’ve read this, or if it will have caught me in the time it took you to read. I don’t know what it wants from me, but I know for a fact it’s nothing good.

Look, if you still don’t believe me, I hope you will by the end. I have tried to explain absolutely everything in the pages of this book.

Please, read fast. I worry my life depends on it.