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WELL YOU’VE FOUND IT.
I’m relieved, I must say. This being a major part of my life’s work, and all that. The whole project ended up being more convoluted than I originally planned, but as long as this journal is in your hands (it looks a little odd, right? I’ll explain that later, don’t worry) then everything has gone as planned.
I’m counting that as a win.
Where to start? You must be wondering what you got yourself into. This is a happy message, a story of hope, I promise. It’s just that it didn’t start out that way, and when I remember back to what my life was like—what the world was like—well, I feel your pain.
Trust me.
It’s the old story. Thrown out of home. Dropped out of school. Met a guy. And all the stuff that comes after. You know how it is. Don’t feel sorry for me, though, I didn’t have it that bad. It was just some stupid decisions mixed with some bad luck. But show me any teenager who makes good decisions and I’ll show you a kid who never tries to push the boundaries.
I was always a kid who pushed the boundaries.
I was super happy when I beat the sixteen-year-olds to get the job at Maccas, though, given I was twenty-one by the time I decided that I needed to start earning my keep. It was a job, and it didn’t pay the rent but I couldn’t find a rental anyway so it didn’t matter, did it? Couch surfing was fine, and it wasn’t like I was the only one doing it. No one could find a damn house or a rental anywhere once the 2010s started, and as they progressed it got harder. I remember. I was there.
I don’t miss that, I can tell you. I miss some things; I miss Netflix. I miss flying in planes. But I don’t miss the rental market.
Anyway, I’m off message again and you’re really going to wonder more than ever what you’ve found, aren’t you? I mean, I know that you’ve found the journal because I’ve put it under the floorboards of an old fixer-upper that gets renovated in 2030, and I know it gets lovingly transformed by hand; no wrecking balls and scorched earth policy here! So I know that this journal will survive intact, and that you will find it, and hey presto a voice from the future!
Are you confused? I’m sorry, I’ve probably confused you. You will forgive me if I’m not that great at linear descriptions, given what has happened to me. A straight line of cause and effect isn’t something that sits well with me, now that I know that it’s, well, it’s all bunk, isn’t it?
Time, that is. Linear time. Time isn’t before, now, and after, despite what we’ve been taught. It’s all over the shop. Seriously, there’s no rhyme or reason. You just have to know how to bend it. Flex it. Manipulate it.
Of course, it was the old guy who came through the drive through at about 11pm on a Friday night that started it all. He had an old car, that’s why I first noticed him. Old in a good way, not old like a Cortina; a classic old, beautifully restored 1930 Ford Ute. Have you ever seen one of them in the wild? I certainly never had. Looked like it had just come off the showroom floor (because it had, of course). Anyway, it came through drive through and the guy ordered something (I don’t even remember what it was, to be honest), but what he was wearing was also worth noting. Black suit, black coat, old fashioned hat, sunglasses. He looked like something out of the 1950s.
So, guy dressed like he’s from the 1950s comes through in a 1930s car, and I just assume that he’s really committed to the whole retro aesthetic and I’m am pretty impressed to be honest, but it isn’t until he opens his mouth that I start to think that things are entering high strangeness territory.
“Hello Gloria. You’re looking well. You’re looking young, I should say. I hadn’t realised how lovely you were at this age.”
So, now it’s weird and a bit skeevy. But despite the fact that what he’s saying is potentially cringey, it didn’t alert any alarm bells in me. I’ve got an excellent bullshit detector and it wasn’t going off yet. He felt, what’s the word? Authentic. That’s it; he felt authentic.
So, here’s me with my hand out waiting for payment for his order and he’s just looking at me. I mean, sunglasses are hiding his eyes but I can tell he’s looking at me.
I say, “Thank you very much sir, that will be $8,” (or whatever it was), hoping he’ll just give me the money and drive on. It’s not like anyone was behind him (remember it was 11pm) but getting involved in conversations with odd men in the middle of the night isn’t really my jam.
He says, “Of course, here we are,” and drops something into my hand. And while I’m staring at my palm wondering what he’s given me and whether it’s some foreign currency (it used to happen, trust me), for what couldn’t have been more than five seconds, he disappears.
As in, actually disappears. Well, I didn’t see him go ‘poof’ or anything, but he was gone, and the boy in the next serving window didn’t see him, and his order was never collected so I’d say that constitutes literally disappearing, wouldn’t you?
Of course, now I get it. Now I wouldn’t blink twice, but back then, well, it was odd.
But, and I have an absolute certainty that this is one of the reasons that I was given The Knowledge, it wasn’t that shocking to me. It didn’t blow my mind totally. Because, of course, I’ve seen other weird stuff in my life.
So I just went, “Well that’s a thing”, slipped the piece of paper into my pocket and kept working. A double shift, because your girl had to make coin, you know.
It wasn’t until I was back home that I took the time to look at it—which you might think is an unlikely delay given the fact that it was given to me by a guy seemingly from the past who then disappeared. But what can I say? I’m a really good worker. I stay on task. (I’m a Virgo, after all). But I did eventually look at it. I just expected a phone number or something equally underwhelming, but it was a set of coordinates. Longitude and latitude, which piqued my interest because I’d been getting into geocaching during the last few months, so the idea wasn’t totally foreign to me.
What, you think a high school dropout can’t be into geocaching?
Good, just checking.
As I said, my interest was piqued, because I’m not a stupid person. I’m just a person doing an exhausting job with little to no cash flow or career options ahead of me, so of course I followed the coordinates. You would have too. Or maybe not. But I’m guessing you would have. A little mystery is good for the soul, right?
I mapped them out first, of course; I’m not naive enough to just randomly go running around the bush at the behest of random disappearing guys (do you want to get murdered? Because that’s how you get murdered). But once I determined that they did not lead to the middle of the Belanglo State forest, then I grabbed my pack and headed off into the city. That’s where they pointed to; a rundown and not yet gentrified part of the city.
Sure, it could have been dangerous there too, I guess, but the city doesn’t make me nervous the way the bush does.
I know the city.
Well, that is, I thought I knew the city. Because there I was, walking up an alleyway, just where the coordinates directed me (and yes, keeping an eye out in case anything starts to kick off), and then . . .
I understand ‘time portal’ is something that may make you slam this journal shut and write it off as a joke, but you’re holding it in your hands, right? You’re holding a book in your hands made of a material that you’ve never seen before, right? It might look familiar, but try to tear the cover. Go on, try. Now try to ball the whole thing up in your hand. Yes, the whole journal, see if you can ball the whole thing up, and . . .
There you go. You can’t do that with a book from your time period, can you? Manipulate the temporal dimensions of a material object and then reform it again, just like that?
Don’t worry, you don’t need to understand it. You just need to believe me.
But yeah, I went through a time portal. What can I say? That makes it sound a bit simple, a bit trivial, but, of course, it was anything but. Quite a few of us were given The Knowledge, so that we could send messages back to you. Some people have actually come back in person (old mate in the Ford for example) but I’m the ‘journaling girl’, apparently. That’s my mission. This isn’t the only one of course. But it’s the one intended for you.
And this is what I need you to hear.
I know that things are really really hard on our planet at the moment. There have been some terrible decisions by people in power. There has been so much exploitation of the planet and the things that make their home on it; human, animal and plant. It’s like we don’t even know that we’re connected to the Earth, isn’t it?
I’m here to tell you that it will be alright. There is time to fix it, and that’s what will happen. Don’t give up though; it’s people like you who will fix it. Your anger and your passion. Your inability to take no for an answer.
For a start, you completely rejig the way decisions are made; you get rid of these huge governments who just care about making money and exploiting you. There is a return to small, local governments, little communities, villages, dealing with your own problems in real time, with people who know each other.
The big cities didn’t work. Sorry if that’s hard to take, but they all break down. They started in the Industrial Revolution, after all, so it was time for a change.
And fossil fuels; they’re gone. So, sad for a while (no more driving all over the place!) but also thank god, right? It’s the main thing that finally turns the planet around. Just in time, too. You have to let some things go though. The internet was a fad. More bad than good. Sorry, but there it is.
An amazing new renewable resource is discovered too, but if I tell you that I’d have to kill you (just kidding). But trust me, it changes everything. I might have had a big part to play in that, but that’s another story
But what I need you to take away from this is that everything is going to be all right. It’s going to look different, sure, but it’s going to be better for your children’s children than you could ever imagine. The looming dread that so many of you feel right now will be gone; those memories will just be stories from the ancestors—stories from when the planet was on a precipice—but the Great Wheel of Life was recalibrated once again.
Read through this journal, read about how life will be, and what you can do to help bring that about, because a brighter future is coming.
Just have hope.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: EVA Leppard lives in the bush with her husband, children and a disturbingly large number of rescue animals, many of who she raised by hand whether they liked it or not. For someone who claims never to have enough time to get everything done, she subscribes to a lot of streaming services.
