Prologue

Time ebbs and flows all around us, moving with us making us feel it as it passes. It can be soft as a summer's breeze or harsh as a hurricane's gale. Like the wind it is untouchable and uncontrollable. As time streams by lives are lived, with happiness, tears, and if we are lucky triumph, but I never felt as though I was in the right place. It was though the life I was leading was not the one I was meant to live. As if there were some great cosmic mix up and I was really supposed to be born in a different time and a different place. Even when I was at my happiest something was missing.

I know I am not alone. There are a few of us out there that live life because we have to live it, but really find ourselves more at home trying to relive an age that has passed. We are those who have eyes that see more than others, that know early on more than others. That understands the views and ideals of time that seems archaic in our own society. Possibly we have old souls. Maybe we are people who have lived many lives and the one we long for is the one we loved most of all. Maybe we left someone we loved behind there, someone we have yet to find again. Or perhaps these ideas are mere fancies and it is as simple as it is where we truly belong. I don't believe in mistakes, just fate and for those that have never felt it's guiding hand trust me it exists.

Those of us that know the feelings I have previously mentioned, often learn to cope with feeling of displacement by trying to momentarily relive time through acting, writing, or reading. These are unfortunately the only outlets afforded to us, but what if you could really do it? What if someone took time in their hands and blessed those few with a chance to live when they were meant to live, in a time they were meant to know, that in their hearts they know they really belonged in. And if we could do it, once we got there would we find we understood as much as we really needed to?

Therein lies the question. Can someone from the future ever truly learn to fit into a society that in all actually is dead in our time? Problems we would face would range anywhere from learning the current slang, to learning the very beliefs of that culture. We are as far from the Victorian morays as we are from the morays of an isolated African tribe. For centuries modesty, particularly for women has been radically different than the ideas of modesty today. Ideals on relationships between man and woman were greatly different than now. Not to mention the differences between the roles and attitudes of women and men. Could one learn to adapt to these differences? Could they manage to become part of society without getting themselves locked up or worse getting themselves killed? How would one live, how would they interact with others, how would they love?

There is the greatest question, what if they fell in love? What if they found that person that we are all looking for? That one who seems to know our very soul? The person that you long to share everything with? How would you tell them, or would you? Would you live a half lie with someone that you cared so much for? Or would you admit the truth? And if you admitted the truth would they believe you or turn from you? These were questions I never pondered, but were answered for me.

I have left this story in the hands of my dearest friend with the wish that she pass it on to others. If happened to me it could happen to others, and it is my hope that they learn from the mistakes I made. The one of greatest lessons I can offer that I have learned is that life is life, whether you live in the past or present. It is not a storybook, it is not a movie, and it has a way of doing things in it's own way with it's own surprise ending.

That was the hardest part I think. The idea of time travel was so fantastical that for a while I could not believe it was real. I ran up against the very social gaps that I previously mentioned and learned there were reasons for the attitudes and beliefs of that time. Reasons I did not take seriously until brutally forced to. Reasons that kept those that followed its rules safe. My wish is that no one learns this lesson the way I did.

The most important part of my story though, is I went to another time, to another place, and I loved more than sometimes I think is possible. I lived more that I ever could have in my own time. I stepped through the hourglass and felt its sand shower over me like a waterfall. I came out on the other side, in a place I never knew I wanted to be, in a time I didn't know I needed to be in, to a love I didn't know I longed for. For that I will be eternally grateful to the hand that guided me there.

Briar Fitzgerald