Time Machine

Recently I came across one of those 'morality' questions I've seen a hundred times before. This one was the old Hitler one... if you could go back in time and meet Hitler before he became bad Hitler, would you kill him? I always say no, because you can't kill someone for what he might become, even if, as a time traveler, you know what he will become. I wouldn't kill him, but I'd try to talk to him. And considering I'm Indian, I figure if he even lets me talk to him, that's a good sign. But the question got me to thinking... not about killing Hitler, but about time machines. If I had a time machine, where would I go? A lot of people might want to go visit a relative they miss, or visit a famous person/time/place. Some people might just want to go back 30 minutes and choose something different for lunch. I on the other hand, want to go back to Spring Break of my senior year in college. Why? I'm glad you asked...

Spring Break, senior year of college. I had never gone anywhere during a spring break. This was my last chance to do something, so myself and three of my closest friends, decided to go to... Disney World. I know what you're thinking... what could be more manly than four heterosexual men spending a week in Disney World. At the time, it all made sense, although right now I can't for the life of me remember why we all agreed to that. Make no mistake, I love Disney World, and have gone many times, but with three other guys? Anyway, that's where we decided to go.

We stayed in Kissimmee, which is right next to Orlando, at a motel. We were college students, and cheap ones at that, so staying at a Disney resort was out of the question. Renting a car and staying at a motel nearby was much more reasonable. The motel was kind of old, but decent. It was four or five stories, and one of those where you part outside your room and walk (or take the elevator) up. No central lobby to go through or anything. And once you step out of your room, you're on a walkway that overlooks the parking lot. Again, not fancy, but not bad. We had two rooms next to each other and we had a good time going to Disney and Pleasure Island and all the rest. We even ran into a group of girls that went to our college. They were staying at a nicer place and we didn't like them too much, but it was nice to see a familiar place.

One early evening as we're getting ready to go out, I'm standing on the walkway waiting for the others to finish. As I'm looking on to the parking lot, a car pulls up. Blue, some kind of Honda Accord or Toyota Camry, with a college sticker on the back windshield. The car pulls into a spot right in front of me (we were on the fourth floor, so I was looking down) and out of the car steps four girls. All looked to be around our age and all looking as attractive as a girl can from four stories up. I immediately run back into my room and tell my roommate what I had seen. The other two come in a few minutes later and I tell them the same thing. We then devise a plan. Let's invite them up to our room for a party sometime. So my roommate sits down and starts to write what will become an infamous letter in our circle of friends. It begins, "Dear fellow spring breakers..." and after that I don't really remember what it says, but something to do with, we're also on spring break, we're having a party in our room in a couple of nights, why don't you stop by. So as we leave, we put the note under their windshield and head off.

We get back that night, the car is gone. The next morning, the car is there, with no note. That's a positive sign we think. We go out that day, come back in the evening, the car is gone. As we're getting ready to go out that night, once again I'm dressed first and standing out on the walkway, and I see the exact same car pulling into the parking lot. I call all of the guys out to watch and we're all standing there, looking down as the car pulls into the space. Same blue car, same blue sticker on the back. The car pulls in, stops, and the doors open. And out of the car comes a man, his wife, and his two kids, one who appears to be a boy around 8 and a girl who looks to be about 13.

I think I may have been the one that cried 'Oh shit!' as we all ducked then crawled back into our room. The other three guys are just looking at me, and I have no idea what's going on. Look, I said, yesterday four girls got out of that car, and they were all our age! My friends look at me like I'm nuts. Are you sure it was the same car, they ask. Yes! It was the same car! It has the same college sticker on the back! At that point, for some reason, we decide to leave. Thinking it would be wiser to take the stairs, so as not to run into the family while they take the elevator, we run down four flights of stairs... right into the family of four. The son is playing some kind of game, the mother ignores us, the girl looks at us, and the father looks like he's going to kill us. We sprint to our car and take off.

This happened a long, long time ago. To this day if you say the words 'Dear fellow spring breakers' to any of my college friends, they all laugh, while I get a little hysterical. Not one of them believes that I saw what I KNOW I saw. But I know what I saw. And there's no way for me to mess that up. What are the chances there were two similar cars, with the exact same college sticker on the back? I can't remember what the school was, but at the time I knew they were the same. From then on, up to and including today, any time I make some sort of recognition mistake around my college friends, the whole episode is brought back up.

So back to my time machine. I have no desire to go visit dead relatives. I don't need to meet Albert Einstein. And while it might be interesting to listen for the gunshots from the grassy knoll, I don't want to visit Dallas during the Kennedy assassination. If I had a time machine, I would go back to that motel during my Spring Break week, my senior year of college, bring a camera and prove, once and for all, that four girls got out of that god damned car.