It’s New Year’s Eve 1999. I am in charge of controlling the New Year’s ball and it’s decent that night in Times Square. It weighs over one ton with a 6 foot diameter, and it brightly decorated in lights of many different colors and hopeful messages. I was nervous and jittery, though I had no reason to be. I had practiced for the past month, day in and day out on a virtual simulation. But this was the real thing and I was afraid I would ruin the new millennium for the entire world.

I sat in my cabin throughout the evening watching all the acts such as the Backstreet Boys, Shania Twain, Ricky Martin, Britney Spears and more. As the sky got darker and the stars started to appear, the butterflies in my stomach seemed to get more and more active.

“Calm down,” I thought to myself, “Just enjoy yourself, this is the only millennium you’ll get to see. They wouldn’t trust you with this responsibility if you weren’t ready for it.”

As I am calming myself down, the news anchors start the countdown. Yet this announcement does not register with me right away, as I am preoccupied with my own thoughts, and by time I realize my mistake and start the descent I am 2 seconds too late. I dropped the ball, and not in a good way.

Everybody is confused. The official clock is adjusted before anybody can understand what happened. All the while the pit in my stomach grows larger, threatening to devour me. When the ball hits the ground, everybody cheers and yells, “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” Nobody knows they are 2 seconds too late.

Suddenly 2 men in black suit and sunglasses burst in and drag me to their van. My heart beats faster. They make me sign each page in a large packet of papers and my guilt does not allow me to refuse. Later, I figure out it was a document binding me to secrecy about the events of that night. I also found out that the official time has been set back 2 seconds.

I have told my story and now the world can know the truth. The truth that now is really 2 seconds from now. My name has been erased from history, every trace of it, of me, removed from the world. I have been forced to “disappear” and now that I have broken my contract, my guilt forcing to tell the world the truth, I will forever be on the run, for creating a hole in the fabric of time.