Loading

The anxiety that comes with your whole reality coming crashing down and being replaced with a giant white “LOADING” text on a black background is hard to understate. It was all I saw. I had just hit thirty, my friends were counting down the seconds until the magic time came. My friends chanted alongside me, “THREE, TWO, O-” and that’s all I got before I ended up here.

I was worried about my friends and family. Mum was a great person and did a great job raising me, but will I see her again? If this was a loading screen it was doing a really bad job of it. There was no percentage, no bar, there was no motion of any kind except for me walking around trying to figure out what was going on and where I was. I was willing to entertain any notion that wasn’t that this was some great literal loading screen for my life. I couldn’t bear the thought.

The white text wavered a bit and I was suddenly thrust back into my life. Well, my life. It felt like my life. You know when you awaken from a dream that felt so real but as you come back to reality you begin to have the rest of your life bleed back in? That was me, waking up from my bed in a Spanish mansion in a Spanish villa. I rushed to the window and the Mediterranean beauty surrounded me. My life here was coming back, that I was a multi-millionaire and had retired since I was thirty. But the other life felt so real as well. I needed to do something about it. I remembered my exact address from my other life, and I was going to find out what happened, if it was real, and what the hell that loading screen was about.

I rushed outside and as expected there were no cleaners. I’m a millionaire but I’m not insane, I know that buy cleaners is a bit of a waste of money. Although the caveat with that is you’re okay with living in a bit of a dirty house. I threw on what clothes I had and hailed the closest taxi. I didn’t speak Spanish but I said airport, as well as airporto and a variety of other faux-Spanish words that he might understand. Something seemed to get through to him as we were off and in no time had hit the freeway.

I was on my phone desperately looking for a flight before we reached the airport and I found it: One direct flight from Barcelona, Spain to Boulder, Colorado. Time to pay past me a visit. Or was it my past? I have no idea.

The taxi plopped me at the airport and with a sense of purpose, also no luggage, I rushed in. “Name, baggage to declare, flight to board?” She asked in perfect British English. I sighed a relief as I knew in the back of my head I might have to be fighting a verbal fight with someone at the terminal who didn’t speak my language.

“Ah, Phillip Sherman, no baggage to declare, flight 505 I need a ticket right now.”

She wasn’t phased so much by my urgency but from my second answer.

“No baggage at all?”

“Nope, none.”

She sighed, “Fine, sign this to declare you have nothing to declare and I’ll get you the ticket.”

We exchanged information, signatures, and money until I got my ticket. I was coming for you, me. I sat at the aeroplane’s front. If I was crossing the Atlantic I’d might as well do it in style. Soon, I’ll be face to face with whoever I was looking for, if it was me, if the address really did exist.