One Wizard’s Guide to Time Travel

Once upon a time in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada…

I stepped outside my Chinatown apartment after a few days of constant rain, the kind that soaks through the bones of the city and hangs heavy in the air. 

The streets were deserted, save for the occasional rumble of a passing car. 

Flickering neon signs buzzed like electric bees, and the streetlamps—barely shining through their dirty glass casings—cast a dim glow over the slick pavement below.

The city was quiet, yet alive, breathing slowly beneath layers of grime and water.

That midnight moment could have been from a hundred years ago—or perhaps from a future yet to come, a future where the same neon lights flicker through the same rainy night casting the same dim light on the same greasy streets.

Time felt slippery, like the wet pavement underfoot, streaked with oil and slime.

I’ve remembered this moment with photographic detail for 5 years and counting.

In that time-melding moment, I was everywhere at once.

Every rainy midnight I’ve ever known, and every rainy midnight I’m yet to know, blurred together into a cohesive whole, same as the lights beaming on the slick asphalt.

The smell of the damp and dirty city streets mixed with fresh rain, a scent so sharp and nostalgic I felt something deep within me being tugged upon. The sound of rainwater trickling into gutters, the distant hum of tires on wet pavement, the occasional shuffle of a stray pedestrian echoed in the damp silence… In that quiet, I felt time bending, twisting, inviting me to step through a crack in the universe.

You see, time travel doesn’t require magic, fancy gadgets, or wormholes. 

Sometimes, time travel happens in a single breath, beneath a flickering neon sign on a rain-soaked street. Time travel is about feeling your current moment so deeply that the boundaries of past, present, and future dissolve into one infinite now.

That night in Chinatown, I was transported. 

The sensation of the rainfall’s final few drops on my skin, the glow of the neon lights, and the muted rumble of the city beneath my feet connected me to every moment I’d ever experienced just like this. And every moment I will again. I will not forget.

In that breath, if you're quiet enough, you might just catch time stretching and swirling around you, looping you into every rainy night you've ever known, and every one that awaits you still—like a whisper from the universe reminding you: 

Time doesn’t just march forward. Sometimes, if you listen close, time dances.

So the next time the rain falls, the lights flicker, and the world feels a little quieter than usual, remember that you are a traveller of time. All you have to do is notice.

With love from the forest,

~ Alexander