Time travel is much easier than most people think. Time is only the fourth dimension, after all, just one step away from the realm we claim as our own.

Draw a line, and that’s one dimension. Draw a circle, arms and legs, and a cheeky grin. There’s your two-dimensional man.

Next we give him flesh and bone and make him do a jig. Look at him go! He’s a real boy now.

And then, well, what’s next? If you’re a little bit smarter than the average cookie, you know that he- that we- shuffle through time, one heartbeat after another, slowly drawn out like doughy worms into the fourth dimension.

Wait, that’s no fun, I hear you cry. That’s not REAL time travel.

Well, you’re not wrong. It can be a lot more fun than just trudging along the normal way… as long as you’re happy to get your hands dirty.

After all, for Mr. 2D to really experience the third dimension, you’d need to screw him up into a little ball and chuck him from one side of the room to the other.

And why would you bother? He’s nothing to you.

So I ask you, if a fleshy Mr 3D happens to want to catch a lift from one part of the fourth dimension to another, how would they do such a thing?

You want to travel through time? My friends, you’ve got to pay a toll.

And look, I’m not saying you’re all a bunch of flat, crunchy potato chips, carried through the universe by a being that does not think twice about your existence, but I’m not not saying that either.

Let's just put it like this. The best you can hope for is that someone else is picked up by the greasy, eldritch fingers of time before you eventually take your own turn. And if those fingers happen to carry a few extra crumbs from one part of the fourth dimension to another as they mindlessly shovel morsels into their gobs, well, you’d better hope your sacrifice didn’t happen to be finger-licking good.

I’m laying all this out there so you might understand where I was coming from when I decided to introduce my girlfriend to the mirror.

The thing is, I had no intention of letting it eat her. There are more than a billion other people in the world I would prefer to throw into the ever-dark maw before I chucked her in.

However, it doesn’t hurt to make sure that you’ve, you know, put on your own oxygen mask before you help others.

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Now, before you start getting judgemental, all of those people I just implied that I fed to an ancient mirror in order to smooth my own passage through time were sacrificed for a good cause. For reasons you can barely comprehend, I’m sure, but absolutely valid and important ones. World peace, for example. The end of disease and hunger. Ensuring Half Life 3 gets made (that one has been a thorn in my side for a LONG ASS TIME, let me tell you). Yeah, I’m basically the source of all things good in the modern human world.

Well, except for her.

And it’s honestly very rare that people get entirely digested by this process. They usually only lose a limb or two. Or three. Depending on how far forward in my own lifetime I go before needing to reset. They don’t even remember having an able body once the process is finished and we’re all back at the beginning, and you can’t miss what you’ve never had. A couple of them even became special olympians, so, you know, you’re welcome.

So let's get back to this girlfriend. She’s a pretty sweet girlfriend, if I do say so myself. And I would know. I’ve had a few. You might recognize some of their names, but I won’t kiss and tell.

This girl is different. She’s not the best looking girl in the world, honestly, although she is pretty enough. If I could go back far enough to fiddle with her genetics I probably wouldn’t bother. Even though I’m pretty good at using CRISPR by now.

Unfortunately, the mirror doesn’t work like that. I can only go back to the moment I first discovered it. So, no, I haven’t gone back to the dinosaurs. I haven’t slept with Cleopatra or bought a stack of Van Gogh’s paintings for a bottle of cheap absinthe.

Still, there’s a lot you can do in a lifetime. Luckily, I discovered the mirror when I was young. I think I was maybe… 23? 25? Something like that. I know it seems like a weird thing to forget but once you get past the first millennium the smaller numbers don’t mean very much.

I do remember that it took around six tries before I even managed to score her number. Maybe that’s why I like her. She plays hard-to-get like a champ, even when her opponent is using all the cheat codes.

Still, I figured out her moves in the end.

The weird thing was, for some reason, once we were together, I didn’t lose interest.

Not to sound like a crazy person, but humans have been getting more and more... let's say, boring to me on an individual level. Oh, I still want to, you know, solve everything, but I have to confess that it’s become more like… a challenge. A puzzle I want to solve.

Speaking of puzzles, I’ve been with her for several full lifetimes now and she can still surprise me.

I guess that's love.

I know, I know, it’s cheesy. Call me crazy, but I figured if I was ever going to share my secret with anyone, it would have to be her.

I’ve taken some precautions of course. There's not much risk, as long as I make sure to tell her a few years after the reset point. If she takes it badly, all I have to do is… well, reset. I won’t use her to do it, of course I won’t. We’ll just take some students out for a hike in the wildness, or whatever. You know it’s not all that difficult, after all this time, to get someone to fall into that obsidian reflection so I can use them like a boogie board on my way through time.

Unfortunately, I don’t think she’ll consent to it, the first time at least. One thing I do admire about her is how damn principled she is. It’s difficult for someone to truly see the bigger picture until you stretch out their point of view.

Anyway, it’s no biggie. She gets to benefit from my own experience.

When the time comes, I’ll feed someone else to the mirror first and then I’ll push her in.