It’s ironic that on the weekend of the daylight savings time switch, I should be throwing out some old porn old documents when I came upon what technically might be my first screenplay: a 15-page, hand-written, poorly formatted script entitled Daylight Savings that I wrote in the sixth grade during the same period as my brief tenure as an elementary school porn mogul.

I vaguely remembered it and took a few minutes to read it to refresh my memory. The story is about a young boy (who is simply known as “boy” in my script) who somehow gets left back an hour when everyone else sets their clocks ahead one hour in the spring. So basically he exists in a reality that is one hour behind everyone else. The boy learns to communicate with his family and friends by leaving them letters which they find one hour later (since he is one hour behind everyone else) and they in turn leave him letters which he gets one hour before they’ve actually written them (I know the logic is convoluted. Sue me, I was a kid.).

Soon the world learns of his condition and he becomes a celebrity. The smartest scientists try to find a solution to his problem but cannot. He is given a video camera and can record messages that are retrieved one hour later and broadcast to the world. The boy finds massive fame and the adulation of the world but he is lonely. No one else exists in his time frame so he can’t talk or connect to anyone face to face—only through the letters, videos and the gifts left by his many fans.

In my script, he learns to adjust and deals with his condition as best as he can. He grows up, graduates from high school and college, gets a job (repairing clocks and watches—what else?) and becomes an old man of 30 (at that time, that seemed really old). By now, he’s been largely forgotten by the rest of the world and has accepted that he will spend the rest of his life alone; always an hour behind everyone else. By this point, the only family he has is his mother and she is also the only person who still cares about him. But his mother dies in a car accident—I wrote a really silly action sequence about how the boy learns that his mother will die an hour later from a news report he’s received from the future and tries to stop it, but ends up being the cause of the accident. Like I said, convoluted.

Feeling he has nothing to live for after his mother’s death, the boy decides to kill himself. Just as he’s about to put a gun in his mouth, he hears a voice. This is how the moment plays out in my script (cleaned up for grammar and spelling):

Was the boy hearing things? He put the gun down and turned around and saw a girl. The most beautiful girl he had ever seen in his life. And she was here. In his time.

GIRL: “Hi. I didn’t think I’d ever find anyone else here.”

The boy could see the girl had been crying but she was smiling now. He knew exactly what she was feeling. So he smiled back. He was no longer alone. They were no longer alone.

And the script comes to an end. I hate reading things I wrote in the past because usually the work sucks and it’s painful to revisit. So reading something I wrote as a kid was even worse. It was sappy, full of clichés, awkward exposition, bad dialogue and had an overall air of incompetency. But if the execution was at a sixth grade level, I found that I really liked the story itself. It was imaginative in the way that only a kid could be—no understanding or respect for any of the rules of drama so the story went in weird and wild and raw directions. And that is one thing I can’t fault myself for.

Looking back now, I realize that the story probably came from a very personal place. I moved around to a number of different schools as a child and always had to compensate to fit in (usually as the class clown or doing outrageous things like the porn comics). Oftentimes this was because I was the only Asian kid in the class but going into any new and foreign environment at that age is tough regardless. Of course I couldn’t have known it at the time, but writing Daylight Savings was probably my way of dealing with my feelings of wanting to settle and belong. I suspect that’s why I started to write as a kid. Writing stories and drawing comics (even the porn ones) was a way of dealing with that loneliness.

But finding Daylight Savings made me think of all the hours I spent as a kid at my desk putting to paper the stories that were floating around in my head. I’m sure if I saw those stories now, I’d think they sucked too but I remember some of my ideas and I have to admit they have their charms. There was one story about a town of benevolent, nocturnal werewolves who realize that every day when the “full” sun is up, a monster is terrorizing them—a were-human. In another story, a man in his car realizes that if he stops driving, his vehicle will explode because of a bomb (this was more than a decade before Speed, by the way). Since he has never traveled beyond his hometown, he decides to keep driving until he sees as much of the country as possible before he runs out of gas and dies.

I’m sure I’m a much better writer now. But I hope that sense of unbridled imagination that I saw in my first script is still in me somewhere. As adults, I know we sometimes lose that. And that would be a shame.