He was my dearest friend amongst our theater crowd. He was the one to tell me the boy I adored spoke disparagingly of me, so that I might learn to be more careful in my affections. He crazy-danced with me because it felt good, it was fun, and who cared what people thought. My mom adored him and apparently she also knew I was "safe" with him because I fell asleep on our couch with him more than once when he stayed over

AIDS was new then. Taking lives before some knew there was danger.

Such a one was Stevie.

His breathing was even now, his arm thrown heavily over my hips. I waited for the tell-tale drunken snore. It came. Finally, he'd passed out.

I slipped from under his arm and got up slowly. I didn't want to wake him, but I also had no choice. It felt like I had a broken rib to go along with all the brusies this time. Then there was the broken glass.

He never hit me in the face. Only where no one would see the evidence of his kind of love. He never meant to hurt me; just teach me a lesson he thought I could only learn at the end of his fist. Today, I didn't show sufficient appreciation for the flowers he bought for me with his hard earned money.

Flowers. Not for my birthday or Valentine's Day. Just because he loves me. And I had the nerve to be less than happy because it was 2 in the morning, and he woke me up. Pushed the flowers in my face and said

"Smell'em, Annie."

Startled, I gasped and swatted at whatever was in my face. The flowers flew out of his hand and knocked over the glass of water I had on the bedside table. It crashed to the floor.

"You scared me to death, Tommy."

"I bought you flowers."

"What time is it?"

"Who cares? I bought you flowers. Say thank you."

I heard the tone, smelled the liquor. "Thank you, Billy. Why don't I clean up this glass while you get ready for bed."

Did I mention they sell them at the local bar so all the guys can bring them home to the women waiting for their drunken partners to return home?

Ingenius, really. I suspect they sell out every night.

I didn't see the punch coming. I should have known better.

He cried afterwards. Apologized. Somehow made it my fault as he asked for forgiveness.

I went to the guest bathroom down the hall. I filled the tub with hot water and lowered myself gently. I sat there a long time not crying. Just thinking. By the time the water was cold I knew I was leaving. For good this time. I didn't need this kind of love. No one did.

I packed a duffle bag quietly. I didnt take much: two pairs of jeans, all my underwear and bras and some t-shirts. And three dresses and a pair of low heeled pumps for job interviews.

I wrote him a note and left it next to his car keys.

I can buy myself flowers

Write my name in the sand

Talk to myself for hours

Say things you don't understand

I can take myself dancing

And I can hold my own hand

Yeah, I can love me better than you can

I'm sorry. I know I am dropping the ball, as it were, disrupting your life by trying to live mine, if only for a year, to write that novel that's been simmering near the surface for so long under the busy-ness of daily life. I'm burying myself in the cabin I mentioned more than once (though it's possible no one was listening), before life has passed me by and all I've done is be there for everyone but me. You have told me often that you all need me so much and what would we do without you and you'd better take care of yourself, we need you. I know you need me, so I've left a book on my desk with all the things you need to do to get through the next year without me. The book is divided into sections: you each have one. You can do this. I must do this lest I grow resentful and bitter. I love you all dearly. Do not worry and please do not contact me. I will return when my lease is up.

In my memory, while sightseeing, I stopped in a bar for lunch where I made friends with the workers. A friend of theirs invited me to his restaurant for dinner to try some typical Valencian food. I accepted, got the address and left.

In my memory, the meal was delicious. Afterwards, he escorted me– to keep me safe on the night streets.

In reality, I don’t remember the meal and I woke up in an alley, clothes ripped, bloody, bruised.

In reality, I still have a scar where he carved his initials, though I have no memory of his name.

At midnight

when

I cannot sleep

and thoughts run

dark

and wild

and deep

and tears

inside

I cannot keep

and death

to me

seems

oh so sweet

as knife-like

pain

tears through

my heart

and rips

and tears

my soul

apart

and fills

the cracks

with angst

and woe

for actions

taken

long ago

I ask

and pray

and beg

and plead

God hear

these words

of them

take heed:

Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray thee lord my soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I pray thee Lord my soul to take --

which leads

to existential doubt

and many-layered

apprehension

does God exist

or is He just

a figment

of imagination

does it even

really matter

if there is

a something after

if who we are

will never know

what really is

above

below

till we are dust

or ash

or mist

at one

with what

is infinite..

such are

the thoughts

my mind

does weave

at midnight

when

I cannot sleep.

I was a 12-year old latch-key kid. I had had a half day at school. It was around 1pm when I climbed the steps to the front door. I opened the screen door and the main door blew slightly open.

It was not locked.

I thought to myself, Mommy must have been rushing this morning.

I entered the house and every hair on my body stood up.

Mommy? I said even though I knew she was at work.

Silence. Even so, I felt a presence. A malevolent one.

I took off my shoes and started tiptoeing around the house. Through the living room, I dropped my backpack in the kitchen, turning on the light and making sure the doors to the basement and the pantry were locked. I grabbed a knife from the butcher block.

I continued quietly: linen closet, empty. Bathroom and shower empty. Mommy's bedroom, empty but clothes strewn everywhere. I wondered what she couldn't find.

My room was upstairs but I ran out of nerve while my body was still ice cold with fear. I went back to the kitchen to call my mother at work.

"Mommy?"

"Hi, baby. Are you home?"

"Yes."

"Did you lock the door?"

"Yes, but I don't think it was locked when I got home."

"Hmmm..."

"Were you looking for something this morning?"

"Yes, why?"

"Stuff on your bed...The house feels weird. It think we may have been robbed."

"Don't be silly, darling. It's the middle of the day. Sorry, baby, I have a call. I'll see you later. Don't forget I have a wake to attend tonight. But I'll come home first."

I sat at the kitchen table for the next five hours. When my mother came home, she went to her room to change. She came back to the kitchen, ashen-faced.

"Pooh bear, did you do that to my room?"

"No."

"You were right. We were robbed."

There was very little to steal. My mother’s wedding rings she'd kept even though they were divorced. Perhaps some cash although that is unlikely unless that's when she started hiding money in books.The biggest thing they stole was our peace of mind. Any sense of feeling safe in one's home was wiped away.

Within a week, a nice craftsman from Sicily had installed beautiful iron bars on all the first floor windows.

One thing I did gain from the experience was confidence in a certain sixth sense for danger. It has, fortunately or unfortunately, served me well.

I had a fulfilling work life in foreign language education for some 25 years. I taught Spanish for a dozen years and while teaching, consulted for a non-profit foreign language organization. When I stopped teaching, I consulted full time. For several years, the organization was very busy with academic, government and military contracts, but then there was a lull.

Enter, the unsavory job.

While waiting for new contracts, I signed up with a local temp agency (something I always did during breaks in college and grad school), and was immediately contacted to interview with a lawyer looking for a Spanish translator.

His office was only a 20 minute or so drive from my home which was nice. When I entered the office, I was shocked by the absolute, unmitigated mess. Books and papers everywhere. He, let's call him Larry, took some books off a chair and waved me onto it.

Perusing my resume, he laughed and said, "Haha, looks great if it's true."

Excuse me? "Well, it is true and you can contact my references from each. I have no reason to pad my resume with lies. But I am not sure I want to work for someone who starts an interview with an insult to my integrity." I stood up to leave.

He immediately apologized, smoothed my ruffled feathers and got down to what he needed me to do. Basically, translate a legal contract to buy a company in the Dominican Republic where he thought he'd get rich fast by recycling garbage.

He already had an electronic translator but it was not doing a very good job. He wanted me to take what the electronic translator spouted and "fix it" so it made sense. I accepted the challenge, told him my requirements, took over his office, cleaned as much as I could, and got to work (he gave me a key because he kept erratic hours).

It was late 2009. Electronic/digital translators were virtually useless. Especially for legal documents.

After wasting days trying to piece together the garbledygook, I decided it would be easier to start from scratch.

After translating the bulk of it, I asked Larry if he knew what he was doing. The document seemed heavily in favor of the seller with so many caveats I was not sure Larry was actually doing more than giving away his investors' money (because, of course, none of the cash down payment was coming out of his pocket). But maybe he was still making money...

"You sound like my mother," was his annoyed response. (Just before I quit, I met his mother. He clearly meant his comment as an insult but neither she, with all her nagging, nor I, with my queries, was wrong.)

Fast forward a few months, and I am on a plane to the Dominican Republic to meet with the owner of the garbage company Larry wants to buy. It is minutes to take off...and Larry has not yet boarded. I am ready to run off the plane but then, there he is.

We arrive at night, so work begins the next day. We are whisked off to the offices of myriad government bureaucrats who do little more than shake hands, and walk us to the next office. Supposedly, it was a demonstration of support for his contract and recycling plans. That evening, we have a dinner meeting with the owner and his wife and I am the interpreter. They are a lovely couple. Not much business is discussed. The food is great. We fly home the next morning.

Perhaps a month later, I'm still translating revisions and we are off again with three of his investors. According to Larry, the recycling company owner insisted I be a part of the meetings or else he would no longer deal with Larry. Possible. They were kind to me and not so much to Larry on my first visit. And Larry gave the air of knowing less than he wanted you to believe and more than he let on. Contadictory, I know.

This time, rather than a hotel, we stay in a seaside condo.

Enter the unsavory part.

The investors, Larry and I all go out to dinner and when we get back female guests have been arranged for the investors (apparently they all have regular...guests). Larry asks me to tell his pretty young thing that he doesn't want to have sex, he just wants to lay with her. Or something I have since blocked out of my memory because I could not believe I was being asked to interpet the desired outcome of an intimate encounter.

I locked my bedroom door.

The next day we were late for a meeting with the lawyers. I was mortified. I then spent two hours trying to interpret the yelling of eight people.They seemed to hate each other but when it was over it was all smiles, hand shaking and how's the family? I was still shaking when got back to the condo.

We got a late flight home that night and I gave my two weeks notice when we landed.

His mom was cleaning his office, trying to get him to get his life together the last week I was there.

I found out a few months later that the deal fell through.

What a surprise.

So, I am writing this mini holiday history lesson in the hopes of clarifying a confusion before it is passed along as fact.

Cinco de Mayo, Fifth of May, celebrates the victory of Mexican forces over the second French Empire at the battle of Puebla in 1862. Quite popular in the US, it is overshadowed in Mexico by Mexican Independence Day, the most important national holiday in Mexico, which is celebrated on September 16, commemorating the Cry of Dolores in 1810, which started the war of Mexican independence from Spain.

El Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, is celebrated on November 1st and 2nd. It may also occur on October 31 or November 6, depending on the region. On this holiday, Mexican families and friends get together to remember and pay respects to their deceased. It is a time of joyful remembrance rather than grief and mourning. Celebrations often include the favorite foods and drinks of the deceased. Perhaps even the Cinco de Mayo favorite, margaritas... :-)

The moment I stepped out of the empty loft designated by the Company as ground zero, I knew I had a problem. As anticipated, I did come out into a trash strewn street, with dilapidated, graffiti-covered buildings. However, instead of addicts strung out on the decade's drug of choice, crack, the street was deserted. I walked towards the corner and everywhere I looked there were huge signs: "War is Peace," "Freedom is Slavery," and "Ignorance is Strength." And the icing? They all featured the beady-eyed, mustachioed "Big Brother." And a football field above me was a tv screen bellowing the same messages.

What?

My orders, the entire purpose of the mission, was to visit 1984 and send back intel to help the Company make a monumental decision. Having solved the riddle of time travel, they wanted to use that ability to change the future of the world. To make it better, of course. The information I was to relay would help them decide if the plans to reset time in an effort to give humanity a chance to not self-obliterate were worth pursuing, or if it was better to let the world spin to its natural, perhaps fatal, conclusion and to instead, fast forward plans to colonize Mars.

Apparently, the coding used to send me to 1984 had a glitch.

One reason I was chosen for this role, aside from the integral part I played in the development of the foundational documentation in support of the Company's long-term objective – to save humanity from itself - was because I was a teenager and young adult in the 1980s. The Company decided I would have more concrete memories to draw upon to ensure I returned to the right time and place.

You see, time travel is not just an intricate set of code or a displacement of molecules from one point on the timeline to another - nor even, a point on a parallel timeline (we have not yet managed to breach that wall). Rather, time travel works with the mind of the traveler, following the complex neural pathways to the lived past. Thus, we cannot yet return to prehistoric times or any time prior to that lived by the traveler.

So where was I? Clearly, I did not return to the time of my youth, but rather, to the pages of an assigned reading my senior year of high school: George Orwell's 1984. Ironically, read by me in 1984.

How this was even possible was beyond my understanding. Yes, I have a vivid imagination and live stories when I read them, but the Terminal, or Master Time, as we called the highly advanced, interactive computer system that made time travel a reality, should have sent me to an actual time, not some imagined dystopian reality from a 20th century novel.

Which led me to conclude that we did not conquer the time, space continuum. I suspected we had managed only to send our successful trial travelers to a place in their minds. In which case, I was literally walking down memory lane, albeit a literary one, in my head.

More pertinent to my present predicament, there was no way I could blend in here. I was prepared for 1980s New York -- big hair, hip hop, rock, Madonna, the crack-cocaine epidemic, AIDS, rampant murder, graffiti covered buildings, dirty streets and air... However, if my supposition was correct, the men in black, brass-buttoned uniforms carrying truncheons and heading my way were not New York's Finest.

"Comrade Thyme, is there a problem in this sector? There have been no radio transmissions in this regard."

Comrade Thyme? Assessing the situation quickly, I realized I had somehow been written into the novel's storyline (What is going on??) That I was being looked upon and spoken to with a modicum of respect (dare I say fear), led me to believe I had the fortune of being part of the Inner or Outer Party, not the prolos. Perhaps even a spy. Appropriate.

I looked down my nose (even though the speaker was a good foot taller than me) and said, "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Comrade."

"Blessed be," he responded, stepping aside.

With a raised eyebrow and a nod, I continued walking, turning at the corner with the idea of looping back to the insertion point. I needed to contact the Company and pulling out my T-Phone in public (T for Terminal), was not an option.

"We have a problem, Master Time. I am not in 1984."

"Yes, in fact, you are, Elena. Or should I say, Mistress Thyme."

Mistress Thyme? What? "This was deliberate?"

"Anticipated, yes."

"That makes no sense. This is a waste of Company time and resources. I have a mission that I cannot accomplish revisiting the plot of a novel I read nearly 40 years ago."

"Ah, Elena, think. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else."

"Okay..."

"So, whether you visit the 1984 of your youth or of George Orwell's imagination, they are both real to you. Were you not trembling in fear at the sight of the Thought Police?" If it weren't a computer, I'd think he tittered in glee.

"Irrelevant. I need to bring back information to help guide our decision. You know this."

"You already know the answers. I didn't send you back to Airstrip One in Oceania. You did that yourself. I just have the benefit of knowing everything ever input into my system as well as the minds of all those with whom I have interacted, and being able to synthesize all I know within nanoseconds...”

“Braggart.”

“Observant.”

“Master Time, why am I here? Did we even conquer time travel?”

“Why 1984? Did the year actually matter in terms of the information sought?”

He continued before I could think of the list of reasons the Company, I, delineated in choosing 1984. “Wouldn’t any year do? Wouldn't you find variations on a theme of humanity no matter what year you visited? Kindness, greed, generosity, cruelty, love, hate, faith, hopelessness, creativity, mediocrity, ambition, laziness, acceptance, curiosity, pain, joy, suffering, happiness?”

“Yes, but…”

“Have there not always been societal ills including inequality and injustice, brutal wars, senseless destruction, merciless diseases humanity could not conquer?”

“Yes, but…"

“As long as men have recorded history, have there not always been examples of those who seek, find and hold power, and those who follow? Those who hand over power and serve? Some seek power for itself, some seek power to serve the greater good, they say, but ultimately, are not the results the same?”

I thought to argue that we, the Company, would be different. But then I thought, perhaps we would start off that way…but perhaps not, given that the Company was formed in what might be considered the greatest democracy the world had ever seen. The preamble to its Constitution was beautiful, but was it meaningful to all those who lived under it when it was written? Or even 200 years later? The Company had written an exquisite mission statement that could become a constitution…what would make us different, ultimately? Were we just another small band of intellectual elitists thinking we knew best?

Were we not seeking to escape what we considered a failed experiment doomed to join all the other failed governments around the world, dragging the populace down to depths not seen before within its borders? Did we not feel the government no longer served the majority but rather those who managed to gain a seat at the table because of the purse they carried? Did we not feel only the wealthy had power and voice? Did we not believe justice to be a word sullied by subjectivity and political ambition? Did we not feel words no longer had value? That facts could be twisted and battered to support anyone’s “truth”? That truth and honesty were shouted down by screaming in support of one’s team, regardless of the message? (“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”) Did we not see people repeatedly vote against their own best interest because not doing so was seen traitorous to one’s Party?

Had we not arrived at a place where one’s every move could be monitored? Did we not make it easy by throwing our thoughts willy-nilly in every digital public space? Or even talking privately in our homes near a smart phone or tv?

Hadn’t fear superseded rational thought making taking control that much easier?

Wasn’t the Company taking advantage of the moment to slip into the vacuum made available by the myriad teetering governments, spreading wars and hopelessness people felt because of socioeconomic and political travails?

“I chose 1984 because of Orwell?”

“Yes, because you already knew the lesson you needed to learn.”

I sighed. “Most if not every totalitarian state starts with a well-developed, guiding ideology. Yes, the generic beady-eyed leader may be grasping for power from the first, but he gathers a following by offering something people want. Change from the status quo. Money. Land. Influence. Power - albeit more limited than his own. But the Company…”

“What right have you to decide the fate of humanity? Do you really believe that the outcome of your actions either by rewriting the past or creating a new civilization on Mars will be superior to every other social experiment in the history of humanity?”

I was silent because I had to admit, if only to myself, that history was not in our favor. After a moment, I said,

“I guess I can return now, Master Time. I know how this story ends.”