1 A Painful Past

Thursday, 9th January 2020,

6:05 am.

*Crunch* *Crunch* *Crunch*

The repeated sounds of feet crushing gravel as I ran, made its way through the voice of 2pac dissing Biggie on one of the most iconic diss tracks of the century that was blaring in my ear from the headset hanging on my head.

"First off, fuck your bi**h and the clique you claim, westside when we ride, come equipped with game…"

I rapped along with the voice of 2pac, ignoring everything but what stood before me as I ran, not yet huffing and puffing as I had just begun my morning jog.

There weren't many people on the walkway I chose for my jogging endeavors.

It was one of the reasons why I chose this path in the first place despite how exposed it was to the especially cold January weather in Los Angeles.

As I ran, I sang along to 2pac's song, yet my mind was elsewhere, which was the fact that it had already been twelve years since I woke up in this new reality.

Yes… new reality, this wasn't my first shot at life.

My name is Jason Bolu, and I aspired to become one of the greatest footballers of all time, but like everything else in life, it all went terribly wrong.

It had started with my parents and baby sister dying in a car crash while in a rush to make it to the kids' league match, I was playing. 

When I found out about it, I couldn't help but think that I was the cause of their deaths because if it wasn't for my love of football, it wouldn't have happened.

I was a kid back then, but I wasn't stupid either.

I had stopped football for a long time because of the trauma from that event, but eventually, my trauma was no match for my love of football and my passion resurfaced.

By then a lot of years had passed and the best time to create a foundation for myself as a professional footballer had passed me by, but even in the face of that I remained undaunted and began to strive for my dreams once again.

I trained and trained and went for football trials, hoping to get noticed by a scout.

Unfortunately, my barely average skills made it difficult for any major football team to scout me and I was ignored by all but a scout from a less-than-3rd tier team in Europe.

Since I didn't have much of a choice, I agreed while thinking that I could improve my skills and move to a top-flight team later…

It didn't happen…

I trained so hard I could barely become a training partner of Cristiano Ronaldo and I constantly did my best to get better, but anytime I improved and changed my skill set to work best with the advantages I had over other players, the injuries came, and I had to change my play style all over again to a different style to avoid a recurring injury.

Finally, my perseverance paid out and I got a lot better and moved to higher-tiered leagues, all while slowly getting better, but before I could achieve anything substantial, I had run out of time.

I was approaching retirement age, and my body could no longer keep up with my experienced mind.

I had the skills and the technical mindset, but my body was no longer capable of following through.

It was ironic and painful that I couldn't reach my goals, so I played for a few more years while doing my best to find a new playing style that wouldn't require straining my body too much so I could at least achieve something, but it was already too late.

In the end, I had to retire and just when I was thinking of enjoying a retired life, I woke up here…

I say here because while I am still myself and the world is still the same as my previous world, there was a teeny bitty difference.

Originally, I was born in the year 1980 and I retired in the year 2020 at the age of 40, but in this new reality that I woke up in, I was born in the year 2001, making me twenty-one years younger than I originally was.

It was strange how that worked as I was still the same person, and almost everything about me was the same, but the whole world had moved past me and placed me in a different timeline.

When I woke up to this reality, it was at the age of 7 and on a football field where a match was ongoing.

 It didn't take me long to remember where the place was as the place held the most traumatic memory of my lifetime.

Still, due to the circumstances I was in, I was quite disoriented and ended up with a ball in my face and went down while clutching my face in surprise and pain. 

Soon enough people came to tend to me, but I was still dazed and was looking around in confusion, my brain unable to accept the reality of what I was experiencing, but the thought of a particular possibility snapped me back to reality and I reeled in shock and stood up at record speed before dashing towards the coach I didn't recognize to ask for his phone.

Even though I couldn't make heads or tails of what was going on, the slight hope that this was real and that I could save my parents and sister from the tragedy that was about to befall them in their rush to reach the stadium on time made me move.

I ran and ran, making my way towards the coach in a bid to borrow his phone and tell them not to come, but immediately I saw the coach on the phone with someone and looking at me with a pitiful look on his face, I knew I had failed.

Even though I was somehow back in the past, I still couldn't do anything about their deaths.

'Why wasn't I sent back just a bit earlier?'

'Just a few hours… no, even a few minutes earlier would have been good enough,' I had thought with pain in my heart, but I received no answer.

The situation I was experiencing was already beyond any reason and whatever was responsible for this strange phenomenon had no obligation to do what I wanted.

It had taken me a few days to come to terms with this new reality and to get over the pain from losing my parents and sister… again.

Funnily enough, losing them again provided the realization that there was nothing I could do to save them as a seven-year-old child, and that gave me the closure that I was never able to get in my previous life.

While it was kind of my fault that they were rushing to come to meet me at the stadium, everything else that happened was beyond my control.

I also realized that they probably loved me way too much for them to want to see me blame myself for their deaths and with that I came to terms with the situation while praying for their souls that were definitely watching me from above.

After getting the closure that I so desperately needed, I was back to having to deal with this new reality that was so alike, yet so different from my previous life.

It took a little while, but I finally concluded that it was only me and my family who had a different timeline and age from the previous reality, while everything else was the same as it should have been at that point in time.

What this meant was that while I was born at a different time in history, everything else was the same as it should be in 2010.

Spain still won the World Cup in 2010, and 9/11 had still happened in 2001, though in this reality I was just a baby when it happened.

While this didn't affect me all that much, it still meant that the amount of future knowledge I had differed from my previous reality.

'Well, it didn't matter much to me how much future knowledge I had anyway after all the world wasn't coming to an end anytime soon or anything of that matter,' I concluded in my mind.

After all, my goal was to become a football legend, so there was nothing much future knowledge had to do with helping me achieve that.

I would still have to train like my life depended on it, play and prove my worth in matches, and attain legendary status with my plays.

Future knowledge wasn't going to help with any of that as I was a variable in the possible future already.

With these thoughts, I had dropped out of the youth academy I was in since I had already become a footballer in my previous life, so I knew better ways to train myself.

I already knew my talents and what I needed to do to be able to utilize them.