Excerpt from January’s Thaw

... Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love—and to put its trust in life!

—Joseph Conrad

Prologue

September 2083

Many people obsess over their past, but no one more than I. Perchance it’s because, as a man out of time, I left behind so much of it unlived. If that makes little sense, consider that I’m a time traveler.

Most people either find love or love finds them, and they hold onto it, stay with it their entire lives. They are the fortunate ones. The unfortunate manage to make it out of this life without experiencing love, perhaps taking solace in the juxtaposed adage that it is better never to have loved than to have loved and lost.

I was fortunate in that love found me not once but twice, in two different centuries. In the first case I never realized what I had until it was too late. In the second, I fully realized what I had, but knowing didn’t prevent my losing her. You could say I’m living proof that one can be both lucky and unlucky in love.

Love found me the second time a hundred years after the first time. Her name was Ecstasy and she once told me that she loved my loneliness—a man out of place out of time. I surmised that her love for me was born of pity. I didn’t have the heart to tell her my loneliness was the result of my losing the one woman who, at one time, mattered most to me. To this day I regret that I never told her how much she mattered. After I lost Ecstasy, I often wondered if she might not have known that all along—that my loneliness was for a woman who could never usurp her place in my life.

People love for a variety of reasons. Initially I loved Ecstasy for her body. But in time, as I realized I’d never again see my native New York City circa 1947, she came to mean much more to me.

Was our love—hers for my aloneness and mine for her acceptance of my aloneness—of any less value than any other couple’s love? Not to us it wasn’t.

Still, during those initial months, each time I poured myself into Ecstasy’s body, in the afterglow it was of Lindy, my first love, that I thought. If Ecstasy knew, she never let on.

In the pages that follow, I attempt, however clumsily, to conclude my life’s story. I will chronicle the events that led to my appearance in a future a century and a lifetime removed from where my story began.

But there is more. Much more.

Although the backdrop for my story is time travel and alternate realities, the underlying theme is a more human one—of love lost, another love found only to be lost, and of a decision, the result of a single regret brought about by the realization that my self-professed courage to never risk my heart to love was instead cowardice, to rectify a wrong in a life filled with myriad regrets.

By the end of this account, perhaps you will understand why I risked giving my past self the chance at the happiness that long eluded him. I failed and he paid with his life. But those of you who’ve read volume one of my life’s story know that. Since then I’ve many times considered making another attempt. Was I justified to try even once?

You may judge me, as it is man’s nature to judge others, or discount my story as the ravings of a lunatic mind or simply the fiction of an overactive imagination—but before you do, I ask that you read on to the end, and then ask yourself if you would have acted any differently.