Chapter 1: A Painful Past

Chapter 1: A Painful Past

Thursday, 9th January 2020,

6:05 am.

*Crunch* *Crunch* *Crunch*

The repeated sounds of feet crushing gravel as I ran, made its way through the voice of 2pac dissing Biggie on one of the most iconic diss tracks of the century that was blaring in my ear from the headset hanging on my head.

"First off, fuck your bi**h and the clique you claim, westside when we ride, come equipped with game..."

I rapped along with the voice of 2pac, ignoring everything but what stood before me as I ran, not yet huffing and puffing as I had just begun my morning jog.

There weren't many people on the walkway I chose for my jogging endeavors.

It was one of the reasons why I chose this path in the first place despite how exposed it was to the especially cold January weather in Los Angeles.

As I ran, I sang along to 2pac's song, yet my mind was elsewhere, which was the fact that it had already been twelve years since I woke up in this new reality.

Yes... new reality, this wasn't my first shot at life.

My name is Jason Bolu, and I aspired to become one of the greatest footballers of all time, but like everything else in life, it all went terribly wrong.

It had started with my parents and baby sister dying in a car crash while in a rush to make it to the kids' league match, I was playing.

When I found out about it, I couldn't help but think that I was the cause of their deaths because if it wasn't for my love of football, it wouldn't have happened.

I was a kid back then, but I wasn't stupid either.

I had stopped football for a long time because of the trauma from that event, but eventually, my trauma was no match for my love of football and my passion resurfaced.

By then a lot of years had passed and the best time to create a foundation for myself as a professional footballer had passed me by, but even in the face of that I remained undaunted and began to strive for my dreams once again.

I trained and trained and went for football trials, hoping to get noticed by a scout.

Unfortunately, my barely average skills made it difficult for any major football team to scout me and I was ignored by all but a scout from a less-than-3rd tier team in Europe.

'Why wasn't I sent back just a bit earlier?'

'Just a few hours... no, even a few minutes earlier would have been good enough,' I had thought with pain in my heart, but I received no answer.

The situation I was experiencing was already beyond any reason and whatever was responsible for this strange phenomenon had no obligation to do what I wanted.

It had taken me a few days to come to terms with this new reality and to get over the pain from losing my parents and sister... again.

Funnily enough, losing them again provided the realization that there was nothing I could do to save them as a seven-year-old child, and that gave me the closure that I was never able to get in my previous life.

While it was kind of my fault that they were rushing to come to meet me at the stadium, everything else that happened was beyond my control.

I also realized that they probably loved me way too much for them to want to see me blame myself for their deaths and with that I came to terms with the situation while praying for their souls that were definitely watching me from above.

After getting the closure that I so desperately needed, I was back to having to deal with this new reality that was so alike, yet so different from my previous life.

It took a little while, but I finally concluded that it was only me and my family who had a different timeline and age from the previous reality, while everything else was the same as it should have been at that point in time.

What this meant was that while I was born at a different time in history, everything else was the same as it should be in 2010.

Spain still won the World Cup in 2010, and 9/11 had still happened in 2001, though in this reality I was just a baby when it happened.

While this didn't affect me all that much, it still meant that the amount of future knowledge I had differed from my previous reality.

'Well, it didn't matter much to me how much future knowledge I had anyway after all the world wasn't coming to an end anytime soon or anything of that matter,' I concluded in my mind.

After all, my goal was to become a football legend, so there was nothing much future knowledge had to do with helping me achieve that.

I would still have to train like my life depended on it, play and prove my worth in matches, and attain legendary status with my plays.

Future knowledge wasn't going to help with any of that as I was a variable in the possible future already.

With these thoughts, I had dropped out of the youth academy I was in since I had already become a footballer in my previous life, so I knew better ways to train myself.

I already knew my talents and what I needed to do to be able to utilize them.