One of the things I try to avoid thinking about is that I’m putting together a puzzle whose pieces haven’t even been created yet. I can’t help but believe in this story, that it has already happened. Then a date will remind me: I’m sorting through the future.

The big joke here is that I am a propellant guy. I work with solid-state fuels. Worked, I should say. Anyway, the last few months before I was laid off, I was becoming more of a chemist than a physicist. And I’ve never been known as a writer. Quite the opposite, in fact. I tend to ramble and-

There. I’m doing it now.

So the joke… Everyone who works at NASA gets the same questions from their friends and families. And none of them have to do with our fields of expertise. It’s all about astronauts urinating and area 51 and whatever they saw on the cover of the last Discover magazine about time travel and wormholes. I can’t go watch a sci-fi movie with friends and family because they come out expecting me to explain stuff to them that isn’t even real. My sister went to the new Star Trek film last weekend and she calls me wanting to know about the “red stuff” and how time travel works.

Time travel. I have an artifact from the future on my lap, but I still don’t believe in time travel. I’m developing an anti-Cassandra Complex. Instead of warning people about the future and being tortured by the fact that nobody believes me… I’m piecing together a story that has not yet happened and I’m starting to think I shouldn’t tell anyone…

Sure, some bad stuff happens around Molly. Real bad. But there are these moments every now and then, I stumble across them at random, and it makes me think that all the bad moments would be worth it… as long as all of these events really unfold one day.

Here’s another of my doubts, one of those confessions that I started this blog for in the first place: What if my telling the story makes it not come true?

What would Cassandra have made of that?