I woke up this morning, and as I was working from home, I had plenty of time to eat a delicious breakfast. I set my eyes on the prize, Cap’n Crunch’s Peanut Butter Crunch. One of the joys of growing up is feeling like a kid again, and sugary breakfast cereals are an instant flashback to childhood. Things then seemed so much bigger, so when I grab a giant bowl and fill it with the nearly worthless puffed corn cereal, it’s probably three times the amount it was. That’s the funny thing about time though, it’s all relative. So I fill this giant bowl with cereal, and turn around to the fridge to grab the milk.
We have a little flashback here, to ten minutes earlier when I’m making coffee. Get all the parts, empty the bag of beans, and throw it in the garbage. (You can’t see it, because it’s my flashback, but there are very important details in the garbage.)
Back to the present. Or the past. The present of the past. The fridge opens, and I look around for the milk, to complete my fantastic time bending breakfast. It was perhaps half a second after opening the fridge, before even looking in, that I realized I had seen the empty milk carton, sad and discarded, laying amidst the rest of the trash. I continued looking desperately for more milk, or something else that resembled milk, but without any reasonable results. My time traveling, soul soothing breakfast extravaganza failed, horribly and painfully. Here I sit, eating dry Peanut Butter Crunch, saddened not only because Peanut Butter Crunch without milk is not very good, but because now I realize that every bite I take is one less bite that I could have taken with milk.