How to see through time

When I worked for the man with the purple tie, I learned about the instinct of chains. How they like to twine and wrap around each other’s fragile bodies. How they get fat on their proximity to other delicate chains, and become a knotted tangle, with a strength no longer defined by their weakest link.

I learned how to undo this fattening. Two separate tweezers in each of my hands, tugging in different directions, embedded against the loops they could recognize. Sometimes one tweezer would simply hold the line, and the other would use that balance like a second gravity and heave towards victory.

Lately, the oppressions of the world have felt like they are more knotted than they ever have been. All my friends are two-armed needle points, and all their legs are shackled by at least one chain, and we hold each other —and the line — and we pull ourselves towards a lighter tomorrow.

Outside my apartment today, a crow walked past with a dandelion in her mouth. One time, that silly weed bloomed right through the walls of county jail.

Where there are dandelions, there is a way for someone made of tenacity. There is a way to carry hope.

A friend tells me that history has repeated itself so much lately that it’s hard to know which way is forward.

I always know forward because my dead friends are in the other direction.

A teacher once told me there was no such a thing as time travel because someone would have been here already, shouting and bragging about the future. I was young then, maybe 12, without any dead friends, and it all made sense. Ego is a human thing you can count on.

But it’s been many, many years of living now. I can see the chains everywhere, and that someone is always doing the tenacious work of hold and pull. I’m not sure about many things anymore, but the time traveler theory in particular seems suspect.

I’d like to think someone found a way to see through all this tangle and time. That they burst through all the emergence we call sidewalks and all the relativity we call borders. I hope they came out yellow and full-bloomed and human. That they spent all their found time in the quiet dimensions of love, in the arms of whoever mattered to them most.

I hope the wind still carries whatever is left of that time-secret.

I hope I have swallowed it up with my prayers to the morning light, and that I carry the seeds of it in my tired beak like a bonus sun through tide and tomorrow.