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if “history” could be considered a cohesive and singular chronological narrative, another crock of shit—
I was thinking about my mother, who persistently carried her lost homeland jostling inside her like a basket of vegetables.
Fear and tragedy wallpapered my life.
An underrated symptom of inherited trauma is how socially awkward it is to live with.
One of the many hypotheses coagulating in these early days of time-travel was that language informed experience—that we did not simply describe but create our world through language,
“History is not a series of causes and effects which
may be changed like switching trains on a track. It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening.
happen. You talk about changing history, but you’re trying to change the future. It’s an important semantic differentiation in this field.”
the potential of the universe to eat its own tail and swallow us for dessert—
“It doesn’t improve my mood to catastrophize, so I don’t.”
the dimensions of time and space were linked, not inextricably but like a lymphatic
Both were needed for the universe to function in a way hospitable to human survival, and both could be fatally damaged at discrete points while the rest of the “system” appeared to function.
frictional, factional entities which wilt when pinned to flowcharts.
Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions.
so I couldn’t see her expression, but I heard the way her voice shivered on the past tense.
“That’s wordplay. Changing the past is changing the future.
I let her leave without saying goodbye and sat in the pool of silence that followed the crash of the front door slamming shut.
This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.
Autumn stomped on. The days moldered and dampened, like
something lost at the back of the fridge. No matter the weather, there were puddles of brackish rain slung across the pavements.
Life is a series of slamming doors. We make irrevocable decisions every day. A twelve-second delay, a slip of the tongue, and suddenly your life is on a new road.
You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up,
really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up. It’s the same with oppression. You don’t gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaffolding of your oppression. You’ll find the weak joints, the things you can kick in.
I hated this memory, had vaulted and bricked it up many years before, and I’d been horrified to see it written up, all our wounds open to the dirty world.
hoarded decade-old parking tickets? My
I was trying to occupy space in his head. I had ideas for the shape I should take in his imagination.
The great project of empire was to categorize: owned and owner, colonizer and colonized, évolué and barbarian, mine and yours. I inherited these taxonomies.
The only thing you can mend is the future. Believe me when I say that time-travel taught me that.
did that I only existed because my mother had outrun almost;
When I came back to it, I was kneading my chest with the heel of my hand, at the place where my speeding heartbeat flicked the skin.
I was filled with happiness, so enormous and terrifying it was as if I’d committed a crime to get it. No one had given me permission to feel this way, and I thought I might not be allowed
frightened with happiness, harrowed by it. There was no way that anyone could feel this much without also knowing they were going to lose it.
I was there for less than a week. I cannot describe how long a day feels when you think you might have to sit with it indefinitely. It’s a form of torture, I realize that now.
Coming home hurt. They were right there, my parents—the authors of my blood and neuroses—and they were just people.
Rupert Brooke or Siegfried Sassoon—