Encounter with myself

This may or may not be a true story.

Artwork by ViKing

A story of how I met "myself"

I sat on my bed that night, back rested on the wall, laptop on lap. I didn’t have any plans of sleeping. I had a lot to do that night. I had completed the most detailed and challenging HTML5 tutorial I could find. All I needed to do was get to work. There was a story I wanted to finish that night, and I had gone halfway. I had a million ideas in my head, trying to figure out what to do with them. For me that was the main issue, implementation. But the story gets interesting because one of the three most shocking event of my entire life happened that night.

So I kept thinking, writing code, writing words. Hours passed till it was 11:30. Everyone… almost everyone at home was asleep. I knew there was a 99.9% chance he was awake (more on "he" later.. Or never).

I remembered "Oh no I forgot to close up the doors". Everyone knew my sleeping habits so they must have expected me to do it… lazy people, I smiled as I ran down the stairs. I checked all the doors and they weren't locked… as expected. When I was done, the worst happened. The lights went off "Chai NEPA!". I almost screamed. Just when I thought power supply was getting better, they killed my joy.

I hurriedly walked to the staircase. I was going straight to my room to finish my code and go to sleep. But…

There was someone sitting on the stairs. I couldn’t see much but I knew it was an adult male, probably a pranker or a robber. I hoped it was the former of course.

"Who are you. Why are you here?" I asked. I quickly turned on the flashlight on my Nokia phone.

"Hey hey hey. Lights off please." the man said.

"And why should I do anything you say?"

"because I am you"

"Who's this joker?" I thought.

"From the future. And this is not a joke."

"Ok, it would be cool to meet the future Gy… Mr. CEO, you know, whatever. It would be ok to get pranked if it were actually believable."

"But you're nothing like me or my future self. How old are you? 30? Who even sent you? You should've dressed up as a successful man… of some sort, make it more believable. Now go away before I vex and call someone."

The tired looking man just looked. He didn’t even try to argue. Maybe he had realized it was pointless.

No. that wasn’t the case.

"Why did you leave out the insult?" he said

"what? What insult?" How did he know I almost said it?

"I don't need to say anything about that.  You say it all the time so I won't be offended. But I can't say the same about Ridwan. He didn’t talk to you for a month. Things could get that serious."

"H.."

"How did I know? Ask yourself, how would I know about your confusion with life. Your inability to focus. You can't progress in one direction for long. "Gygy_blahblah". Nice gmail password".

I didn’t speak for seconds. I couldn’t. How could he know all that? I hadn't even opened my mouth before he continued, quoting my WAEC result, my worst frustrations, even the name of the person I despised the most.

"Okay, stop. All you said is true. But I still don’t believe you're from the future". One last test, to make him bring out his biggest trick. And he did.

"You made a html5 add and drop app. But it didn’t work. For the past 15 days, you couldn’t find the problem because to your understanding, nothing was wrong with the code. It hindered your learning. You were frustrated."

"You can't know that. No one knows that".

"That is only true if I weren't you. I was you. You didn’t capitalize the 'E' in getElementById, silly".

I was shocked. There was no way anyone but me could know that. only one explanation. I was talking to myself from the future. Before then, I had always thought time travel was impossible, but I was staring at proof of it.

"Come to think of it, your face looks me-ish"

"But you… I'm supposed to be CEO-ish. You look like you’ve not had an idea in weeks. You look sick." I didn’t want to believe I was looking at the future.

"Well, all that is majorly your fault." He said.

"Ehen… tell me more." I was getting upset, but I didn’t want it to show.

"You failed. You have so many ideas in your head, yet you couldn’t make even one reality. If someone could take a look into your mind, they wouldn’t believe you turned out to be me."

"I thought we were supposed to be friends." I tried to ignore the shots he was taking at me "Not everyone gets to meet their future or past selves."

"This is not about friendship. It's about your failure. But you can ask me some fun stuff."

I was a bit relieved. At least there was something I liked about him.

"Name three fun tech"

"Unlimited charged phones, rocket skates, spacediving".

"No way!" I marvelled. The future sounded awesome. Until I asked him about

"Quantum computers?"

"Three years ago. And no, we don’t get to be in the team that finally cracks it."

He sounded low. He was sad, but I wasn’t. I just reasoned that I would make my future, and his present didn’t matter to me.

"You'll fail." He said. "you're nothing but a loser"

"is that all you came back here to tell me? What are you even thinking?" I didn’t try to hold back my anger.

"Your lack of focus or ability to convert imagination into reality will cost you your dreams. Spoiler alert."

"Well then, I'll see about that. And who gives a spoiler alert AFTER the spoiler?"

"I do"

"You're so not me."

"g2g. See you later. Maybe."

In seconds, he was no longer there and I was pointing a flashlight at nothing.

I didn’t know how to feel, or whether to believe what I'd just seen. So I went straight to bed. But I didn’t sleep anytime soon. All I could see when I closed my eyes was him, saying those words "You'll fail." it was terrorizing. I slept and woke up countless times until it was finally morning. I wished it was a dream but it was too real. It felt more like a memory but from that day on, I decided it was just a dream and never spoke to anyone about it.
***
I'm releasing the long awaited (yeah, right) finale of 'the Wake' soon. It's called eclipse.