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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Reasonable-Car5173 on 2023-06-23 13:44:36+00:00.

The way you warp time is really pretty simple. Basically anyone could do it with a few household goods and basic breathing control. People do it unintentionally all the time. It happens constantly, seriously. A cup of tea steeped too long, you take a sip, close your eyes, breathe in, sniffle halfway through the breathing, continue inhaling when you get past that sniffle, you just folded time. It doesn’t have to be tea. Sometimes you can use noxious or caustic chemicals or liquids to do it. Laundry detergent, stuff like that. It doesn’t hurt you. I don’t know why. Anyway, you usually don’t notice. It’s a few seconds or less. And you definitely shouldn’t try to make it any fucking more.

I learned about it about a year and a half ago on one of those obscure imageboards that like a hundred people use, max. I forget what it was called. Potent-something-dot-org or something like that. There was a lot of discussion on metaphysical stuff there. The paranormal, the parapsychological, whatever. The type of stuff directly adjacent to the Chicken Soup for the [blank] Soul books at the library. There was a thread about time travel on there one day. The one day I used it, actually. People got to talking.

What really caught my attention was some anon talking about his own experiences. His most monumental jump backwards was when he went back to 2007 and watched No Country for Old Men in theaters. Apparently, he tried to bring the ticket stub back with him when he jumped back forward but it didn’t travel with him for some reason. I started responding to him, probing, asking more and more questions. He’d describe the way in which you have to breathe to travel a day or more, and I’d ask him to post a vocaroo of him breathing in that way. He didn’t respond to me. He posted a mega.nz link to what he claimed was a Word document detailing all of his travels and all of his methods. Pretty much everyone mocked him and said that the mega link was definitely a virus or something—except for me, who immediately and carelessly downloaded the file, which was a .docx. At that point in my life, I didn’t really care about what happened to my computer.

I didn’t really care about myself or my possessions or my mind or my soul or anything at all. About a month or two before downloading that file, I had a bit of a revelation. I didn’t find God or anything, it was more that I found just a sense of morality. Or really, just a sense of self-awareness. And it really, really got me down. Everyday I was just thinking about the stupid and immoral stuff I did in high school and in college and about all the stupid traps I was falling into still. It got me really down. It was like it just clicked in my mind that I’d done things to hurt people (including myself) and the ringing from the sound of that clicking kept bouncing off the sides of my skull and it really hurt. I’d remember all my past girlfriends and all the drugs I took with them and all the things I did to them while high and all the things I did while sober, too. Maybe it sounds stupid, but another thing that bounced inside my head was all the times I’d sped or changed lanes without signaling or otherwise broken traffic laws, and those bounces made me so guilty too. I just felt selfish. And I was.

I don’t really know how to describe it, but it immobilized me. I kind of just stared at the ceiling and played with my hair. I missed a couple days of work. I felt even more terrible because I was withdrawing from nicotine and caffeine because I couldn’t bring myself to exert myself to move myself even just to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee, even less to go to the corner store to buy a pack of cigarettes. I was fired pretty quickly, my boss already kind of hated me, and my phone was dead so I wasn’t responding to any of his texts. Eventually I stopped neurotically lying in bed and instead started neurotically walking in circles in my room.

Eventually, in a freak burst of energy—probably my body’s last mad dash to try and keep me from dying—I plugged in my phone and my laptop and made myself some frozen waffles. I felt like I was thinking rationally. My grandma had died and left me a lot, a lot, a lot of money, so I didn’t really have to work, and I was such a bad person that it would be better if I just stayed alone in my house, which my grandma had also left me, only going out to engage in some anonymous, non-harmful consumerism. I texted my parents back and let them know that I was okay. I didn’t tell them not to worry about me because I knew that would seem like a cry for help and I knew I didn’t deserve help. About a month or two later, I downloaded that file.

There was a lot of practicing going on and a lot of studying. I bought a notebook from the grocery store and kept some of my own logs to parallel those of my guru, who I never interacted with again, as I’d completely forgotten what that imageboard’s name was, and my browser was set to automatically delete browsing history every day, which was a remnant of my immoral teenage pervert freak days. It honestly didn’t take that long before I first travelled back more than a minute. That made me feel like a prodigy. It was about a week, I think. It was about a month later that I first travelled back over an hour. It was about that time that I felt a purpose in life.

I’d never stopped feeling guilty. I’d never stopped feeling angry at myself. But I felt like God or the universe or whatever had guided the knowledge of these innate human powers to me so that I could rectify my past in whatever way. I felt like it was all planned out, I guess. I started going outside for more than just cigarettes and groceries. I started going to the gym. I tried to quit smoking a few times. I started lifting weights and jogging and hitting the punching bag for like three hours a day. I wouldn’t try to, but I would very, very often imagine myself beating up people who’d done the same things that I had. I’d try not to. The other nine waking hours of the day were devoted to drinking different weird liquids and thus going back more and more time, and then going back forward more and more time. The thing with time travel is that you can’t go into the future because it doesn’t exist yet or something. But when you go into the past, you can go back to when you came from, which is technically the future then. You can go back to the future (ha ha), but you can’t go to the future. So it was only when I was travelling whole days back that I started learning to travel forward in time instead of just waiting.

It was about a year later—I was pretty fit and feeling relatively good for someone who was always aware of having done all those terrible stupid things in the past—that I travelled multiple years back. It was about a year and a half later that I returned to my parents’ house, my childhood home. It was then that I was sleeping in the same bed I’d done so many awful things in. It felt terribly painful, but I also felt kind of hopeful. On a Sunday morning, when my parents would be away at church, I would go back in time about a decade and go up to my teen self and say “You’re going to get older and you’re gonna feel so much shame about everything because you’re hurting people, you’re hurting people, you’re hurting people and you’re hurting yourself, which hurts other people too, y’know?” or something like that. Maybe grab him on the shoulders and shake him at certain points to emphasize certain words.

So, I did it. I don’t really want to belabor things too much. I did it, I made a mixture of a few liquids, but mostly tea, and drank it in that special way and breathed in a very baroque, very intricate pattern. Then I was sitting on my bed on a day that was so familiar it hurt. The light coming through the windows gave me such an overwhelming sense of déjà vu. My heart felt like it was nauseous. My stomach felt like it was burning. My mouth was open, my face was crumpled in a look of concern. I was anxious not just because the moment of confrontation was fast approaching but also because I was pretty sure I knew what day it was and what time it was. I was pretty sure I was about to walk through that door, close it in a spinning-type way (not sure how else to describe it), flop down onto the bed, and think over the day in which I had almost […] but failed, and then touch myself. I felt sick. I felt like my head was in a vise. I felt angry. I felt like I was the girl that my younger self was feeling up at the moment. I felt sick. I felt like my insides were all on fire. I felt like throwing up. I got up, shaking intensely, off the bed, sat on the chair in front of the desk in my old room, turned on the computer, and looked at the date. June 23rd, 2014. I was pretty sure that was the date that that whole scene took place on.

I sat hunched over at the desk, staring at the keyboard. Eventually, a sound snapped me out of the trance, the door opened, and I snapped my head towards it. I saw him standing there, wearing the stupid fucking comfortable red t-shirt with some faux tribal pattern, which is still in my closet back in my own house back in the present day. My eyes dashed to the red wine stain a little down and to the left of that pattern. I knew exactly what he had just got done doing. Pressing his face and teeth too hard against that girl and thinking all kinds of disgusting, vile, evil, sinful, criminal, demonic things to do to her. M…

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