Time Traveler
Bet you didn’t know you’re a time traveler.
But you don’t need nuclear energy or a flux capacitor - it happens in the protein folds of your mind every time you remember.
Memory places you in another one of your own eras. Once you close your eyes and hear the ocean or see the fluttering aspen leaves, a part of you exists at that moment again. You’re a translucent presence alongside the past version of you that was physically there. The difference is seeing it through the filter of lived experiences between then and now.
There’s no stage of life when this is more evident than when memory becomes reliably unreliable. Aged neurons can vigorously erase the lines between when you were fifteen and your son was the same age; you find yourself wondering if you can drive him to his soccer game because you just got your driver’s license. Your edges are fuzzing.
When thoughts don’t proceed on the guiding line they used to it’s like the date readout on the destination dial is controlled by a random number generator. Past and present come together in a chunky vegetable soup of everything that’s happened during a beautiful life. Age is in the driver’s seat yanking you left and right on a whim. It is frightening, sad, and angering when you only know it’s fall by the color of the leaves.
“But here’s the thing. There’s a beauty to it, if that heartbreak can be set gently aside.”
Watching the loss of time’s linearity in someone else is heartbreaking. Confusion at the level of “where and when am I” rocks a foundation that we take for granted. It turns out that centering yourself in time is crucial to happy functionality.
But here’s the thing. There’s a beauty to it, if that heartbreak can be set gently aside. Because you might be able to exist in a room where your grandchildren were playing at the feet of your grandfather - an impossibility given the limits of human longevity. Or, you could believe that the person you’re speaking with is someone who preceded you in death, so you can sit with someone you thought you’d never see again.
Some of your experiences stick, like the time you jumped out of a plane or the color of the Grand Canyon’s walls when you rafted between them the first time. But some may be surprising in only the way memory can blindside you. There’s a smell of hay from the family’s barn while you’re lying in a hospital bed. When the wind shifts outside your window, you remember the way the ferry moved on a day trip to Victoria Island.
You are a time traveler of your own life but it requires no complex magic, only riding the waves as long as you can. When the time comes that they break over your head, know that you’re getting to see your life in a way you never have before and never will again.
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