Two

Phillip woke up the next morning, propped himself up on his elbows and looked at the time on his stereo. It was 8:15am, he had slept less than 3 hours. A weird thought popped into his mind. When you sleep, you close your eyes in the past and wake up in the future, every time. He'd been so obssed with beating time that it hadn't occured to him that he did it every night.He was wearing the same shorts and t-shirt he was wearing the night before. The shirt was an old Colorado Rockies t-shirt that had a large ice-cream stain capping the top of a mountain with brown chocolaty mud. The pint from Glacier Ice Cream was the only thing he’d been able to eat last night. Phillip swung his legs over the side of the bed and shimmied his feet into his flip-flops. He walked around the bed and parted the blinds with his index finger and looked outside. The sun was shinning like it was a brand new star and the bushes below his window seemed to be a deeper shade of green. It looked to Phillip like the most beautiful day ever to dawn in Boulder. Things look almost too good to be true, he thought. It was early May and the day might look stunning outside, but the temperature would still be about ten degrees colder than short-sleeves weather ought to be, even for Boulderites. Good enough for jeans and a sweatshirt, he figured. Phillip stepped outside and found at once that his ten degree estimate had been a tad too generous. The Chinook winds that blew over the foothills and pleasantly raised the temperature the day before had given way to the bone-chilling wind that blows from the artic. Phillip considered going back and putting warmer clothes on, but instead jammed his hands into his pockets and walked briskly toward the University. Kristen was waiting and he knew she wouldn’t wait long. At work she had heard Phillip mumbling to himself and endured his behavior grow more erratic and mysterious in the last few weeks and it took a great deal of cajoling to get her to agree to meet him before her classes. He wasn’t even sure what he would tell her, but he had to tell someone. Because once he went back for good, the future as he knew would surely disappear.