I Didn't Exist

A void now exists in my life. Due to the way time zones are set, I experienced time travel and leapt into the future, skipping July 4^th. I ceased to be on that day; I was gone. If anyone asks me what I did on July 4^th 2008, I won’t be able to answer because it never happened. It is a black hole in my timeline.

My flight from Los Angeles to Auckland was an overnighter. The plane took off on the evening of July 3^rd. At that same moment, it was the evening of July 4^th in Auckland. By the time the crowded plane I was on crossed the International Dateline, it was the morning of July 5^th. Since I was a passenger, I didn’t have the authority to tell the pilots to turn around. I had lost 24 hours in an instant. Well, not lost; more like moved ahead.

Crossing the Dateline has permanently shifted my timeline ahead by 24 hours. So when I arrived in Auckland on the morning of July 5^th, my body was still thinking it was July 4^th. This reminds me of hotels not putting floor 13 buttons on their elevators. Doing that doesn’t mean the 13^th floor has disappeared. The 13^th floor is now the 14^th, and the 14^th is now the 15^th, and so on and so on. But since this whole time change is on a world scale, my mind had to cope with the change, by giving me a whopping headache on Sunday.

I suppose the only way to reverse this leap into the future would be to fly back across the International Dateline in the opposite direction. I’ll gain back the day I lost. I’m not certain when that leap into the past will come so until then, I never experienced July 4^th, 2008.

I didn’t exist.

(The picture is not of my trans-Pacific flight but when I was arriving to Los Angeles. I could have taken a picture of of my trans-Pacific crossing but it would have been all black.)