Time Travel

I frequently time travel. Eras no longer chronologically native to me sometimes appear at my windows. All fight and flight and amplified everything. All nest and grassy down and summit. Once I stayed with a friend I’d not seen in years after she’d had a surgery. I was just here, I thought in her driveway, its mélange of sea and asphalt and orange blossoms and her neighbor’s cigarettes fresh in my nostrils. Looking at the garden gate, I saw my friend push open the top half of the Dutch door, lean on her elbows, hair, still coral and auburn, pooling over her shoulder, to ask if I had everything I needed. That soft light of afternoon not quite gone dusk folded its amber wings and came to rest on her cheeks. From my vantage point atop the roof of an old beater of a van the color of rust and ruby, I saw her close the gap between a private exhaustion and my need for a place to park and build my new home. Saw how friendship, like time, can be a coil of loops that return us, now right side up, now upside down, to each other, to ourselves, more Möbius strip than linear dimension, more movement, less wall. It was all so close I sucked in a breath and heard a tiny whiff of noise escape me. I turned from the gate and went inside to find my friend. I said nothing and thought nothing of the tipsy temporal displacement till, late in the evening after tucking her in, I opened my laptop and read what I’d started to write on the plane: “That evening, as twilight set in, I’d just finished installing solar panels on the van’s roof.” From the next room, my friend called, “Do you have everything you need?” and I said, “Yes, I do.”

I’ve been deep in the memoir writing (redrafting) (time travel) of late. And I HAVE to take you along. Of course. You’re my temporal translation plus-one, my forever-has-dibs shotgun ride, my “holy damn, you gotta see this” go-to. (It’s why we went to the ‘90s last post.) I’m working on another piece I want to share with you that goes even farther back (we’re talking a number of treks along that Möbius strip)—to an era never chronologically native to me, unless you count what’s buried in my bones.