A Meditation on Time Travel

Can I tell you a not-so-secret-secret? I float between worlds — and years, too. 

The years ‘bit’ is a recent revelation. I’ve become a past-tense psychic. Last Friday, when I stepped outside my building, it was the summer of 2015. The morning was crisp, vulnerably bright but cautiously on edge. It didn’t know what could happen but it had that innate optimism working in overdrive to try to make something good happen. That was me in 2015: full of fervor, and unshakeable, overwhelming hunger, but endlessly guarded. I had safety locks in places that, back then, even I didn’t know about. 

The moment I stepped outside, I was washed in a full-body familiarity; it was as if I had stepped through a portal and ended up inside my 19-year-old body again. But how had I managed to truncate eight years of my life into a morsel of time? How had I managed to even go back? Was anyone else seeing this? More importantly, was anyone else feeling this? And why the summer of 2015? What was so special about being 19 years old again? 

The summer of 2015 was divided into two distinct color schemes: 1, a gradient of hazy purples and pinks, and 2, a series of black-and-white photographs. There’s a cloudy layer covering all the events and feelings of that summer, keeping them from erupting and overflowing on everyone. But not well. There was always leakage, always an overshare, always a too-muchness that I couldn’t cover up. 

I always oscillated between being too much and not enough. Balance was a foreign concept, the same way allowing and receiving love was. A single kind word was an instant K.O. I craved love so desperately, yet any time I got close to it, I backed away, tripping over my own feet. Bring me love! But then keep it very far away from me! I know it doesn’t make sense, but neither do I!

I was deeply excitable and easily upset-able; I was rough around all my edges, and soft in all the places the world laughs at. I was constantly teetering on opposite ends of all spectrums but never finding the center that I so desperately craved. Everything was never-ending-ly spilling out of me and I tried doing everything to contain it, but I could never get it right. I was always too much, a little off, kind of wrong, not right, weird. 

Then it happened again today: I went for a walk on the boardwalk and it was the summer of 2016. I looked around, stupefied. Why the summer of 2016? What had become so special about being 20 again? I was dressed for the winter, three layers of pants, a polka-dot scarf wrapped around my neck thrice, but suddenly it was that summer — that beautifully, vibrant summer whose memories are still coated yellow and pink inside my body — and I was wearing a tank top and shorts, with my hair pulled back into a ponytail, inside of a body that loved to run on nothing.

I stood on the boardwalk, but my body had a different texture to it. A different set of colors, a different set of shapes, a different set of energetic identities that comprised it. I was 20 again but way too overqualified to be 20. 

Whenever summers visit me, like a lingering outline, I become tempted to shed my clothes and run into the sky. I wanted to do that today. At the end of the boardwalk, I imagined that the sky’s mouth would open up, its gummy, reddish-pink tongue would unravel like a fruit roll-up for me to step onto, and then it would swallow me up and away. I always want to let go of this corporeal form. It weighs me down sometimes (I’m sorry). 

That’s why I wish someone else could visit my body, pace my hallways, run across my walls, float through my floors, sit on my chairs, sleep in my beds, dance barefooted on my living room carpet, put on my makeup, wear my clothes, and walk around as if they were me. I want someone else to see inside of me and then tell me what they see. What’s it like to be me for a day? Is my body dark and cavernous, a single floorboard wide, a floorboard that’s creaky and rotted? Or is it an endless maze and the exit moves as soon as you get too close to it? Am I all the colors that could possibly exist, undulating in and out of one another? If you answer yes to any of the above, would you still want to be me after a minute or would that be too much for you?

I’m still embarrassed to write about my sensitivity, my ability to feel spectrums of emotions I haven’t seen people put into words yet, because with it comes this undercurrent of ‘too muchness’. I have always been too much, an odd little big thing. There’s so much that I write that is embellished, worded delicately, worded beautifully, because the truth isn’t beautiful. It’s harsh, sharp, pungent, painful. How do you write about being almost murdered without evoking concern? How do you write about a decade of eating disorders without inspiring pity? How do you write about the tragedies of your life in a way that doesn’t change how people see you? Because I just changed how you saw me. I do it with every single sentence.

I used to wonder if tragedy was the best part of me. That’s why I spent most of my time writing about it. How easy it was — and still is — to swim into the pain and drown myself in it over and over just to create something bigger and far more beautiful than I could ever be. I realize now that I was really writing so I could listen to myself. Everything I have ever written, and will ever write, is a love letter to myself, first and foremost. 

It was 2016 today. And it was 2015 last week. And I don’t think I’ll ever be one thing. And I don’t think I’ll never not be too much. And I don’t think I’ll ever stop never-ending-ly spilling out, falling apart to come back together again. I think I am simply endless