Unicorn Destiny

Poetic Prologue: Anxiety, rebirth panic attacks  

error insinuates fate not agreed by the wanderlust vibrations crawling rapidly through the veins of such navigator. between the efforts of a claustrophobic window of opportunity lies regret, sliced by hope and optimism. each night ponders astro projections into another realm obtained by calmness and focus. searching for answers through meditation, the attempt to telepathically communicate with a past life leads only if? failure is only least of worries as this vibrant soul continues to pursue hope. her past life is naive to future circumferences of pain. a void of illusions lies her past self searching for help,  as her future signals,  signs are intercepted by the laws of the universe preventing connections. locked in shackles the only key is wisdom. will she call quits as the gods call fair game? it won’t come easy but can’t blame derange. will sacrifices blitz while attempts become insane or will she miss, will her past coexist with the remains? damn pain is what she faced with her head held high, victory is maintained.

~encryptedsouls.

Unicorn Destiny: The Now 

Lena shivered. Her legs were crossed as she sat on the cold, tile floor of her apartment’s bathroom floor. The clock ticked well-past midnight: morning on the 20th day of June. Lena was unsure of the exact time, but one thought repeated in her mind with certainty: My destiny, my destiny – maybe I haven’t missed my destiny.

The heat of the prior day had carried on, merging itself with the moonlight and creating an unusually warm night. Lena’s A.C. was still kicking, cold air swelling the apartment since early afternoon when she’d first received Devesh’s response: Can do. Her laptop sat dumbly beside her, dead now. She’d spent the entirety of that afternoon and night sharing floor space with her toilet, staring at Devesh’s emailed words until the screen flickered off. My destiny.

Lena rubbed the flesh of her forehead. Two inches of skin on the right and left sides remained normal – the epidermis of a typical human forehead. Those few inches of normality were warped around the thing that had grown from the center of her frontal bone nearly three weeks before. Lena hated the thing when it had first appeared. But now, the feel of her fingers against the skin around it was comforting. In her mind’s eye, the thing was at the center of her destiny, too.

At 3 a.m. came a knock on her apartment’s front door. Lena quickly pushed herself up, a movement contrasting the lethargy that’d been tying her to bed or couch or floor. She twisted the doorknob then pulled open the door, and Lena found Devesh standing in a trench coat buttoned all the way up, despite the summer. He greeted her with a single, silent nod. 

“Sorry for the mess, Dev,” Lena apologized as he entered the apartment and side-stepped trash bags full of junk. “My apartments’ got valet trash, but I feel bad making the workers carry all my crap from the fifth floor with no elevator.”

“Doubtful they’d take it anyway, at this point,” Devesh replied, continuing past her into the living room. His attire made Lena wonder if he was sick, but it might’ve seemed rude to ask directly.

“You alright?” she said.

“Alright as anyone else.” His tone was a little less surly then, a little more resigned. He glanced up at Lena’s forehead. No comment. Reaching into his pocket, Devesh retrieved a small, grey box with the label Presente-Pasado across the top in gold letters.

“I’m finished if anyone at work finds out these are missing. But I figure you going back could help all of us. The office is practically abandoned anyway, so it’ll be a minute before anyone notices. It’s like no one wants to go out anymore given, you know, the circumstances.”

Lena’s ears barely registered Devesh’s words. As soon as that little grey box had been revealed, the entirety of it no larger than a packet of chewing gum, her eyes locked onto its smooth, velvet exterior, its gold and grey. When that sole commander of her focus landed softly on the coffee table, Lena lunged for it.

“Thanks for bringing the pins. I’ll have the money for them when I’m back present again.”

Lena forced her hands to steady, pushing her feeling of desperate eagerness down so she could carefully handle this life-changing container with care. Her right index finger stroked the label’s gold letters, then her left one did the same. Presente-Pasado.

“It’s on the house,” Devesh said, shrugging. Despite his casual shrug, inwardly, Devesh held a deep fear for what might happen if anyone at work discovered his theft. Still, he figured that since Lena was the ‘first of their kind’ – for lack of better words – she was the one who needed to warn everyone about the change that was soon to come. Stealing the pins was the only way to make that happen. Although they never spoke those details outright, Devesh assumed his friend’s goal was accomplishing that same mission, too.

Devesh clutched his coat’s collar close to his neck. Then his hand right found Lena’s left shoulder, grabbing her attention. His eyes bore into hers with all the hope and sincerity they could muster. “Just… do something, you know?”

“I will,” Lena replied confidently, then caressed open the box’s grey lid to reveal what looked like two small, gold sewing pins.

Presente-Pasado Pins entered the market in 2039 at a whopping $300,000 per box. Economists and entrepreneurs alike predicted the product’s value would never depreciate. The price increased at least $30,000 each of its five years on the market. Throughout those years, the very first Presente-Pasado commercial had been streamed over 78.4 billion times, mostly by working people who could only dream of affording them.

In the ad, a trim man standing tall in his vicuña wool suit declared, “This is the Dimension of Only Good Decisions, the Realm of No Regret.” He took one step forward, his hand gliding seamlessly into his right pocket. “I am here to answer the question: ‘What would you tell your younger self?’”

“And the answer is simple.” The ad man slid a grey box with gold lettering from his pocket. “The answer is here.”

With a flick of his index finger, he popped the lid open, then angled the box down towards the camera, revealing two small, gold pins. “Right here.”

He laid his middle three fingers on the right pin before lifting it from its velvet bed. The ad man whispered, “Presente,” and the pin’s tip slipped into a soft spot near the crest of his right ear. The left pin he fingered in the same way.  “Pasado,” as it was inserted, and the ad faded into a shimmering mix of gold and steely grey.

Lena, too, had been enthralled the few times she’d streamed the commercial. Now she could step into the experience herself, could realign her life with the destiny she’d thoughtlessly let slip away.

The idea to contact Devesh for the pin hookup came to Lena in the middle of the night just two days before. After a moment’s hesitation, she’d reached for her laptop – opting to email since she kept her phone completely off these days. Her message:

Hi, Dev. Neeeed pins. Anything you can do? You understand, right? I wouldn’t ask otherwise.

His responses were similarly succinct. Lena assumed he was avoiding saying anything overtly incriminating. They arranged the meeting date and time: 3 a.m., 20th of June. Now.

“All your lights off?” Devesh asked, standing in the glow of a single candle that sent fragments of light into the room. “This device needs all the electricity you can give it.” Lena shook her head up and down in frantic obedience, like a dog with a treat waving in its face.

Devesh removed his backpack, something Lena hadn’t noticed he’d been carrying. Again, he collected his trench coat’s collar tightly around his neck. From the backpack, he pulled a steely grey tablet no more than six inches in length but four inches thick.  Gold letters graced its back.

“The thing about tapping into the conscious mind of your past self,” Devesh explained, “is you’ve gotta be precise.” He entered the device’s passcode, then clinched his coat’s collar before stepping close beside Lena, showing her the tablet screen. It displayed an AI-generated spinning globe with “Presente” on one side and “Pasado” on the other. Below the animated green and blue, a chart listed countless dates, times, and locations, each one shifting upward at the speed of a small hand on a ticking clock.

“Enter the exact spot you wish to return to in your mind, and schedule how long you want to stay there,” Devesh instructed. “Exact address. Exact dates. Exact times. Once the details are locked in, you’ll connect the pins to your temples. Then, within the time period you selected, your present self will be able to send thoughts to your past self.”

Still holding the pin box tenderly in her left hand, Lena took the tablet gingerly from Devesh with her right and maneuvered carefully to her dining table.

“No matter what you tell your past self, when time is up, you’ll return to this exact spot, but a few things could be changed. Hopefully, a lot will be changed.”

Devesh sighed and let his body fall into the cushions of Lena’s couch. “I’ve spent three years with the development team creating this latest version, and you might be the last person to use it. You know the company’s higher-ups are receiving orders from the government to stop all production and distribution? Of course, everyone wants pins now – even more desperately than before. Everything’s so terrible now.”

Lena wasn’t listening. Her thoughts were on the past and the future possibilities soon to be opened by her return to it. She eyed the Presente-Pasado tablet screen like flies over a plate of food. She whispered, “When was the exact moment I missed my destiny?”

 Unicorn Destiny: Nostalgia

encryptedsouls,poet.

doe times (Dominique Marie Makanaonālani Times) is a Language Arts educator currently studying English Education for Equity & Justice at Boston University. She is *very* on Twitter chit-chatting about books. Connect with her: @domi_times ☺