The first stop he made was at Ludlow plaza, where he took a quick piss and bought cigarettes. Adrian had only been driving for a couple hours; he didn't want to be off the road for that long. He luckily had the necessities for the excursion in his car already: snacks, canisters of water, ear swabs that prevent the blood from dripping onto his shirt when the speed comes close to that of light, goggles to protect his eyes in case the windshield splintered and cracked, and a body-suit for any other faulty ill-equipped, badly-manufactured piece of the Cadillac that could happen to combust during his passing. He still had another couple of hours until he hit the draw bridge were he would penetrate time.

He left Ludlow and got back onto the highway and it wasn't long before he fell back into his clouds of thought-- his ponderous state— it’s what he gets into when he doesn't speak with any other living being for days on end, when he’s just capitulated by his own lonesome. The sun was in the middle of fading away from him. The dark was coming. The highway sped by him at the side, looking right back at him, acknowledging his solitude. Adrian had compassion for the passive, unaccompanied highway, for they shared a lot of the same feelings of abandonment.

The highway fog arose around the two of them--the highway and himself—as they surrendered to the clouds of dark denseness and in doing so, he fell even deeper into his haze of thought. The sounds of the Bjork sampling over his dear friend’s lyrics emanated out of the CD player, connected through the tape player, through the wired connection to the speakers; it hit his ears, and continued to put his subconscious at somewhat of a rest, no hypertension in his brain as it was a few hours back. Adrian exhaled strongly. During his miasma, Isa came swimming into his brain, adding to the few thoughts that were already marooned in its shallow water. He began to repeat the words of his written letter to her family, over and over again within his head. He debated each phrase, each sentence, each word, to their utter substance and meaning.

He made himself break down by each denotation what he was really trying to imply—that her death was an accident of sorts—to illustrate that her death wasn’t his fault, but he could have stopped it-- and he gave a slight hint in the letter, the smallest of barely-interpretable signals, that he found some sort of gratification in seeing her die. He questioned the plausibility of it as being a good representation of his feelings towards his Isa Mishap or if they could identify it as flutter. Flutter: the abundance of adapted, imported, and over-emphasized feelings. He didn't want to give them flutter in this letter; he wanted it to look like the truth. Not only did he write it for her family, for her loved ones, but he also wrote it for himself, so his emotions wouldn't be bottled up any longer- as if his feelings had been collecting for years-sitting...sitting in his mind, just waiting to be twisted off and poured out into the paper.

He took out a cigarette and lit it and withdrew the smoke into his body, digesting it, gulping the flavor, felt it buzzing his bones and settling his ill-at-ease nerves while navigating through the cloudy haze. His mind continued to drift from thought prophesy to the next, some converged, some did not relate in any way.

His eyes were beginning to shut on him. The haze had gotten minimal, as had his thoughts; his mind was tired. He pulled off at Whitney Point and dozed off at an embankment.

Adrian dreamed a surreal picture, one of simplicity, of minimalism, a clean beguiling circumstance; he was at a placid place, staring into a park with friend Jerome and friend Samuel at his side, but when he woke his heart was beating and sweat rested on his forehead. He stumbled out of his car and de-cramped his body from driving position. He took a piss and got back into his car. He popped down the sun blocker and looked at himself in the mirror. His reflection was tired. It had huge bags under the eyes. A small beard had started to resonate upon the face. He started to have yet another debate with his reflection about their lifestyle.

"I am tired. Tired of running from emotions!" the reflection yelled.
"Why do you think we wrote the fucking letter then...?" He said back to the mirror.
"But, you are still running." it said.
“Running yes. But running backwards” he told himself.
"We aren't running forward anymore. We wrote the letter, we took a stand. No longer are we running from emotions! Only from bureaucracy. We are driving because we don't have any other choice."

They closed the sun blocker in tandem and ended the conversation. He needed a shower. He needed something. Some sort of release, for his eyes got their odd twitch and the interior of his brows pointed downward, his left brow slightly closer to the nose than his right brow. He looked as if he was holding in a gastro intestinal emission when in fact it was his thoughts that needed to be unconstrained. He needed to write.

Before departing Whitney Point, he took out his note pad and tried to pour out more emotions on the paper. He sat, quietly as always, and began writing about what the future in the past will entail, not what already happened. He was tired of writing about the actual past. He wrote about it too much. He wanted to write about the future.

He just wanted to forget his Mishap and simply prepare his mind for the way it was and what it will become at this current stage in the future. But in the deep conduits of his mind he knew that even if he went back to the way it was, he still wouldn’t be able to forget what he had already done. What he wrote during this junction was about all the beautiful women that he missed out on the first time around, about the sun, about the big waves which no longer crashed like back when. Thinking about the past is something that will never fade away. It will always be planted in the back of his mind-it will come back into his conscience at any time, without warning, without haste. It will just pop in there and disturb, disturb, conquer any of the happiness that he is trying to get back.

The past disturbs his current life more than he ever bargained for; and all that time, in the back of his head, he knew that life's antecedents would eventually come back and strike him mercilessly. What he needed was to get a move on, his mind was so set on leaving that he did not waste much time trying to clear his head. He figured that just driving, just going, was better than fighting with his disposition on paper. He put on his white and black bandana to hold back the oily grub hair. A good look, I might add.

Hours transcended until the bridge was mere minutes away. The clouds of thought though had gotten to a new high. Staring at the same black lonely road, it was staring back at him, reading his mind and feeling his pain as a recluse. Time went so fast and so slow for him during his expedition -- opposite extensive ends of time-it passed by him while his mind concentrated on things that it never had the time to do before. His ears got tired of being amused by the CD samples, during which time was in slow motion. After he turned off all source of sound, except for the sound of air, the sound of the tires running on the highway, his deep emotions began to flood into his mind process. He analyzed every possible second of his past, every memory, every single action that he had ever wrongly performed and thought about other remedies that would have been more advantageous to the situation... to better the life at present.

During the last moments, he was so anxious, he made his mind slow down and stop concentrating on anything expansively. He created a little song that he kept humming to himself as he approached the gateway:

“Simply singing doesn't stop//Oh these feelings that I get//As I lie in bed-and-wish I was dead//So follow-I’ll follow the great pattern//Show me another way//Stuck in my mind clouds//So I go//I go--On the road--Here I go--Yet I don't know--Where to go//But state to state//I'm unplaced//My mind set ...Is unset.”
He continued to sing that tune to himself in his own self pity. He figured that it was the best way to not think.

Simply singing doesn't stop//Oh these feelings that I get....

He continued to sing it, over and over again with no one to hear. He yelled it; yelled it so loud that it hurt his voice. But he liked it, it was his voice, and he thought it was good, no on else had a say. He continued to sing, yet it got softer and softer as he kept on singing and as the time passed by, it became a whisper and was just repeating itself, as if his brain was not telling his voice to do it, as if it had become some sort of thought-muting auto-mechanism, some sort of instinctual act. It made his mind tired. It made his legs ache. He pulled off at the Bastillo mall entrance, about half a mile down from the overpass, pulled into the parking lot and fell asleep without delay. His dream was dismal, satisfying, simple. With his two childhood friends by his side, he gazed, his whole body at ease.

Though he woke sweaty and shaking; he knew he had had another pleasant dream. He popped down the sun blocker and looked in the mirror at his reflection. He saw the face; it seemed so beaten, so diluted, so unkempt, bankrupt. He continued to stare at it in the mirror, asking it question after question, demeaning it, giving it judging glances as a teacher would her ghastly student.

His badgering of himself was quickly interrupted, and then broken off...by flashes of blue... and red... shimmering in the mirror. He de-focused on the face and fixed his eyes on what was flashing behind him through the mirror. His eyes focused and he saw a police car... then another...then another...then another...then two more... then three more... then... Ooh. Reality as he knew it had settled.

Before all the nervousness and anxiety, before the aghast and apprehension, before the idea of incarceration crossed his mind, a sense of relief consumed his thoughts; he felt a sense of absolution knowing that Isa's family took his letter seriously for all that it was worth because they were able to decode his cryptic message; then it hit him that maybe it wasn’t the parents who were able to navigate through the hidden passages of his letter, maybe it got in the hands of police officers, taken to forensic scientists, then appointed professionals to track him to this very destination. The process formed and took shape and each step they took drifted through his mind: After detectives filed into his house, they ripped it to shreds, searched it for clues and were able to find a trace to my lab, where I had given him the flux capacitor which could, could have then been traced to his Cadillac which they could have then traced to this exact draw bridge which he was ever so close to, which had enough kinetic energy to transplant him through the space-time continuum.

He slipped his body suit onto his body, placed his goggles over his face and slid the swabs of cotton into his ear cavities. He got out of the car extremely slowly. As he stood up, he stretched his legs and his back and stared at the volcano of lights of blue and red and neon, and all the while he was humming his theme song. Many of the officers had removed themselves from their flashing vehicles and were approaching the Cadillac slyly, walking towards Adrian with a stealthy sideward step movement with their guns appointed appropriately at his chest and face. He smiled at them. He opened his palms and extended his arms outwards. His right hand clasped closed except for his pointer finger which stuck out and he began to wave it around at the enclosing officers, patronizing them, denigrating them into mere puppets. He was offering them a duel.

Subsequently after standing stock still for a matter of seconds he drooped back into the car, put the key in the ignition and stormed off towards the bridge leaving the colors of law enforcement blurred by a dark grey haze. The cars followed in the distance, bullets were now being fired and broken glass was upon him.

Though his Cadillac was aged, it still had the same spunk that it had at its initial manufacturing—-the same spunk that made him consider it as an agreeable apparatus. It allowed him to make it to the bridge at a reasonable-enough speed even with a tire deflated by a bullet, and he realized as the chase was nearing its end, a chase that he would be winning, that this kind of excitement, this kind of raw adrenalin was enough to make him reconsider his whole pursuit which he had embarked upon so emphatically. It made him reconsider going back to the past. It made him reconsider changing anything, just so he could experience for a second time such thrill.

And as he and his Cadillac were beginning to morph, he had one thought drifting; one circumstance remained intact. It was the moment when in his drunken state he had a clear head. It was right before the murder took place- the moment before his Isa Mishap. Right before when he killed Isa in self-defense, after she had attacked him. And as he was approaching that moment, it became clear to him that he would put down his book, sip the rest of his wine-about a minute before she leapt at him, and end her life quickly and easily, struggle-free, making him not the defender, but the attacker this time around, and that he would be satisfied, even humbled by that alternative.

The one thing he wasn’t aware of was that the time before that and the time before the time before that, I had given the flux capacitor to Isa and this vicious cycle that I have put them in- a dynamic system of people ending each others lives, over and over again, then allowing them to resurface through time has been my excitement- has given me that raw adrenalin kick that Adrian found so enthralling during his police chase- it has given me the ability to manipulate life, allow people second chances and view their crimson reactions over and over and over again, for I have managed to achieve what most would consider impossible- I have put myself beside God.

The End..?