The first time I saw him, I was barely five, and he was an old, old man.
I was sitting on the paving with my back against the dining hall wall, less than a month into school and already hating it. If I knew the way, I think I’d’ve been out the school gates and halfway to home by now.
A pair of feet stepped into view. I looked up, expecting the teacher, come to take me back in. But she had been wearing a skirt, hadn’t she? Not faded blue jeans. Instead, high above my head, bright blue eyes smiled at me from a papery, wrinkled face, beneath snowy-white brows.
“Alright, kid?”
The words I’m not allowed to talk to strangers hovered by my tongue for a moment, but I let them go. He didn’t seem strange. Or, if anything was strange, it was the way he seemed so very familiar.
He turned away from me, and I frowned. Was that it? He was going now? But he leaned back against the wall and, very slowly, his jacket snagging on the rough bricks, he lowered himself to the floor beside me, and groaned.
“That’s more like it,” he said, looking sidelong at me. I looked sidelong back, trying to stare without staring.
“Feels rubbish, doesn’t it?” he said, and I looked around properly, blinking. Did he mean–? “They can be right bastards, kids.”
Ummm, he said a naughty word…
He stared off into the distance. I couldn’t tell whether he was looking at or through the wall of the building opposite.
“I’m not going to tell you ‘it gets better’. But I will say this,” and now he looked around, right at me, and smiled. “You only get one of these, one time to be you. So don’t go letting some bastard stomp around telling you how to do it, ok?”
Very slowly, I nodded.
“So, back to the classroom?” he asked – and he really did seem to be asking.
I nodded again, and got slowly to my feet. And then I paused for a moment, looking at him, wondering how to say thank you.
He smiled again – a big grin of amusement this time.
“Don’t worry about it.”
I nodded once more – like one of those nodding dogs, I must have been – and turned around, and trotted back to my classroom.
Tick.
I didn’t think of him again while I was at primary school, and I didn’t see him again until I was sixteen, all gangly limbs and exam stress.
He was about twenty-one at the time, and just those five years leant an incredible amount of difference between us. Where my chin was still smooth, he had the stubbly beginnings of a too-lazy-to-shave beard; where my limbs appeared to be held together by luck and elastic, he was filled out and in control.
The eyes were the same, though – and for some years I tried to attribute the way I knew him at once to their sparkle.
He didn’t come at a particularly key moment. I was mooching along the high street, trying to shake the nagging feeling that I ought to be locked up in my room with a stack of textbooks, when my shoulder thudded into someone coming the other way. I sprang back, apologies on my tongue-tip – and it was him.
“Alright, mate?”
I nodded, slowly, speechless. He grinned – the same grin, even with the silly beard.
“I’m sorry, I got to dash,” he said, “But listen – Lincoln, Lincoln’s a nice place, right? Remember that.”
He clapped me on the shoulder, grinned again – and then he was gone, leaving stunned sixteen-year-old me blinking in surprise, and nodding slightly at no one.
Tick.
He didn’t show up when I passed my GCSEs, or when I kissed my first girlfriend shortly after. He didn’t show all through sixth form – not when I was agonising over university choices (and remembering his words, picking one or two to match). He wasn’t there when Lincoln College, Oxford rejected me in one of the most miserable winters of my teenage life, or when Lincoln University accepted me just a month later.
I did see him the next year, on the day I moved up to Lincoln. He didn’t say anything – just held the door for me as I struggled to haul my suitcase from the car to my shiny new room. I nodded to him, and he smiled back, and that was all that was needed.
Tick.
Our paths crossed often enough, but not particularly predictably. I saw him three times during my uni years – held a door for him, ran into a lanky teenage him in the street, picked him up out of the gutter after a particularly wild party. But when I left, it was near to ten years before I saw him again – a chill and casual forty-something, lounging on the bar in an old pub back home. I offered to buy him a drink, but he said he had to dash.
“Before I go, though, one thing,” he said, and I nodded, as ever. “The girl in London. Stick with her, yeah?”
I nodded, he smiled, and we parted ways. At the time, I knew just three people in London – and two of them were guys. The girl I had met just the once, at a party of a friend of a friend. There were plenty of girls in London, though, so I filed the idea away in the back of my mind, where Lincoln had sat for five years once upon a time.
Tick.
I found the girl in London a few years later, after a handful of false starts and confusions – there are a lot of girls in London. He was there, on and off, of course, walking into me at work, in bars, in the supermarket. And when I moved back home, bought a house with my London girl, we walked into each other just as often – on the train into work, in the street, in my local. He offered me a drink, once or twice, but I never felt comfortable accepting. Ours were not the long conversations; ours were the nod and smile in the street, the two lines of greeting as we walked on by.
I was glad he offered, though.
Tick.
The last time I saw him, he was barely five, and I was an old, old man.
My old school had been closed, these five years past, and the buildings earmarked for snazzy redevelopments. But planning permissions being the way they are, the school still stood on the day I wandered up to it.
Getting in was no problem for someone who’d spent so many summer lunchtimes getting out, though my knees were creakier than they had been back then. I shuffled through the abandoned playground, feeling almost like a ghost already.
There, the old dining hall stood, grey and graffiti-ed with its roof all buckled. I stopped by its wall, and ran a hand slowly over the bricks, feeling the roughness snag on my too-dry skin. Then I lifted my hand from the wall, and let it fall to my side once more.
I looked down, and there he was, so small and out of place. I took one step closer, and up he looked, surprise and guilt written all across his face.
I couldn’t help it. I smiled.
“Alright, kid?”
Tick.
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125,015 Literary Works • 672,849 Reviews
Katu. :3
It’s really difficult to think of anything that I could suggest to improve it. However, because of the whole complicated timeline thing, there are a couple of things I’m just a little bit confused about (it might just be me, though) and I can at least point those out. But I’ll start with my overall impression/the things I loved about it.
But if you want them to be left wondering, then it’s really cool as it is. 
It’s taking me a long time to write this review, and it still probably won’t be one of the most helpful reviews ever, because, as I’m pretty sure I’ve already said, I absolutely love this.
Things I loved
First of all, I loved the idea itself. Time travel has been done in so many ways before but I’ve never read or seen something quite like this before; it was different and it was awesome. Once I really understood what was going on, this was amazing — and it was also fun to reread because I found that things I had just passed over the first time stood out to the me the second time round, once I understood it a little better. Clues like the title, and the way the old man seemed familiar to him when he was younger, and the way that the things that happened to him when he was younger happened to him…in reverse, in a way, when he was older. I loved it and it was awesome and now I want to read it again. :3
I also love the character of the narrator. In terms of concrete facts, we don’t get to learn all that much about him and his life, yet by the end of this, I felt as if I really knew him. Name, career, things like that — none of them really matter, and I’m glad you didn’t include them. Instead what I got was a real sense of the character, the kind of person he was, and the experiences in his life which made him himself. I really liked the MC, and really felt for him.
Then there is the fact that it’s just written flawlessly, and it drew me in as a story should. Sometimes I read things on here when I’m reviewing that obviously weren’t edited that thoroughly — a lot of it is kind of worded in a clumsy way and it disrupts the flow of the piece and brings you back to earth with a crash from the comfy place you had found yourself in the story, if you even managed to get up there in the first place — but this was nothing like that, and I felt mesmerised reading it the whole way through. From a few unique key details I could instantly visualise the characters, and the settings, and everything that was going on. The emotion also came through really well and in ways that I didn’t expect, which made this even more enjoyable to read: basically I love love love it. Realising that all along it had only been himself was a kind of lonely realisation; but instantly I could see that much more about the character.
This is amazing, and I can’t wait to read more amazing stuff. :3
Things I was confused about
I guess “time travel” and “slightly confusing” kind of go hand in hand. xD This left me with a lot of questions (I don’t want all of these answers — maybe just some of them?) For instance, what was the nature of the time travel? Did the narrator even realise that he was time travelling? Was it just very occasional, a few brief slips back into time (I assume so?) None of these really need to be answered — I like how they get my imagination, as the reader, going — but they’re pretty interesting.
The main thing is that I’m not totally sure about how obvious all of this is meant to be. Is the reader meant to come to a definite conclusion at the end, or are they meant to be left wondering a little if their conclusion is right? At the moment, I’m closer to the second one. I have to admit that it took me a little while to get what was actually going on; probably because I formed the assumption at the beginning that the MC and the “stranger” were actually seperate, I spent maybe a little too long trying to get my head around what was going on and couldn’t stop thinking questions like wait are both of them time travelling or just one of them? Again, maybe because I didn’t really keep enough of an open mind, I didn’t get it straight away. Maybe there weren’t quite enough clues — I don’t want to suggest that you make it too obvious because the suspense and the uncertainty are kind of cool and a part of what makes the story awesome, but at the same time I feel that maybe it’s just the tiniest bit too easy to miss, and took me maybe a little too long to figure out. If you want it to be clear who the person the narrator keeps meeting throughout the story is by the end, I’d give the reader maybe another small clue or two. Possibly.
I’m not sure whether to mention this, because it makes sense now (and I like the irony xD) but it confused me at first. Again, I think this is one of those “really awesome once you get it” things, but when I was still trying to figure out what was going on it slightly tied my brain in a knot.
…Basically this is just really, really awesome, and reading over it again, I don’t want you to change anything because I love it as it is. I guess it’s also a really hard one to edit because you can’t really ask the same people to read it over if you change something because they’ll already understand it by that time, so you have to find people who haven’t read it yet and have no idea. Again, my only suggestion would be to maybe possibly give the reader a few more clues to help them “get it” more quickly — and to try to convince more people to read this because it’s lovely and people should get to read it. :3
~Miste ^_^
Happy Review Day, Cadi!
Nitpicks:
- This is a very interesting opening.
- 'paving'? Did you mean 'pavement'? Or were you implying something else? English isn't my first language. XD
- 'back against the dining hall wall'... Maybe it sounds better if it's 'the wall of dining hall'? That'll make this sentence much longer though.
- This sentence seems too long. o.o
- Shouldn't that be 'expecting the teacher to come and take me back in' or something like that?
- I liked the contradiction there.
- I liked the innocence there.
- I didn't get this. Didn't you mean 'looking through or at the wall of the building opposite' rather? Anyway, what building are you referring to? Was there a window? Just the wall? Clarify this.
- He looked 'around', 'right at you'? I didn't get this. Your prepositions are confusing. xD
- This was unnecessarily 'long'. 'I nodded very slowly' or simply 'I nodded slowly' might be better. This change isn't necessary though.
- Putting commas after coordinating conjunctions (f.a.n.b.o.y.s.) is wrong unless there's an interrupter. But you intended a pause there so I don't know. o.o Perhaps an ellipsis?
- Why should he say 'thank you'? Because of the 'words of wisdom'? Just a question.
- I've seen this simile before. Looks like this is starting to get cliché. o.o
- You described with having snowy white brows and an 'old, old man'. I'm confused. Are you referring to the same person here?
- Vague.
- Perhaps an 'a' before 'stunned' there?
- Why is he expecting him in this paragraph (beginning with this sentence)? He's a stranger. I understand that you are implying that he's lingering in your character's mind, but the way you wrote this paragraph didn't pull it off well. Maybe write 'Not that I'm expecting him' or something like that at the beginning?
- By this paragraph, your character had already met the man 'several' times already, and yet no real conversation has been started? No spark of interest showing? Or is that implied by this work 'dedicated' to that man?
- By these parts, things have been happening so fast! What is going on? xD But anyway, I get how you wanted to write this.
- 'nods and smiles' rather.
- 'two lines of greetings' perhaps?
- By this time, you have used commas before 'though' like three times already. They aren't really necessary, unless you intended pause.
- :O
- Why would he go back to his old school? Nostalgia thing?
Bah! I knew it was him! But you've got some explaining to do! lol
Anyway, this was very interesting.
Questions! How come the reader 'recognized' the man is he decreased in age, even though he's the same person? And why does he meet himself? I don't understand the background of this story. xD But perhaps, this is one of those stories that are just told as it is, with no beginning, no end, and no point. Well, this is a short story, not a novel. These stories don't really need an entire 'world' to serve as the foundation, if you get what I mean. They're just there. I'm probably just not used to this as I am more accustomed to novels.
Nevertheless, nice job! This story succeeded at catching my interest and triggering some emotion and these are what matters. Keep it up!
Never stop writing!
Hi, Cadi! Here as promised.
(And also, review #1 ! *flail*)
I hope I can be any sort of help or at least eye-opening 'cause, like, this was awesome. It was fun to read and is a unique idea. I got a very good idea of the MC's life even with it being chopped up into little scenes like this. You pulled it off well!
I don't have any nitpicks, so I just have overall impressions. I mainly just liked it a lot. xD *flail*
I found myself getting confused as to how old the stranger was compared to the MC. I want to say that it was meant to be opposites in the aging process (one gets older, the other gets younger), but I think there was a scene or two where that got fuzzy. I know the second scene did because the stranger went from old man to twenties. So it must not be a straight timeline.
Omg, it's the Doctor.So yeah! I was a bit confused in that regard.
I'm also curious as to why this stranger has this kind of interest in the MC. It seems kind of weird, but nothing to hurt myself over, of course.
I like how the characters all remain anonymous. It actually worked very well with the way the story ended -- in that sort of loop. It leaves the reader's thinking, and I love those kind of endings. The one that make you think. So needless to say, I was really happy with this.
I think that I only had the one concern though, and that is possibly make it clearer their ages. Since that's sort of a major factor in this, erasing that confusion would probably be helpful. You do such a good job describing their age by appearance! So much kudos on that.
Anyhow, I must venture forth now for four more. Apparently, you're two down. *flail* Tehee! I look forward to reading more of your work!
Keep writing!
Jabber, the One and Only!