Graduation, Time Travel, and the Former Self

It’s cap and gown time, endings and good-byes. I don’t have a cap-and-gowner, but we are saying good-bye to elementary school. I’m old enough to have a cap-and-gowner. In traffic I watched a woman take a photo of her graduate as he held up the gown to reveal neon yellow spandex shorts. I thought “Oh that must be his sister,” then realized, uh, no. There are certain weirdnesses to realizing that I could have a cap-and-gowner and still have had a newborn at a reasonable age—like, not under twenty-five. There are also advantages to blooming late. A big one is the ability to recognize seminal moments for what they actually are. And all these moments where we pose for cameras, wax poetic, perform grand look-backs, make yearbooks and say good-bye seem to me to be excellent opportunities for time travel.

In fact, time travel is inherently involved in all posed photos. I’ve felt it since I was young, that eerie, stand-still-you’ll-remember-this-forever feeling. When we take a photo we’re saying, “This is important. I’m going to want to look at this again someday. It’ll be fun to feel something totally different than what I do right now.” We’ll study ourselves in the picture, especially if we were kids, and we’ll marvel, I can’t believe that’s me. That eerie mix of recognition and non-recognition, the mysterious element of self alienation, that is what I’m calling time travel.

I’ve never liked time travel books and movies. They all center on a logical flaw: the time loop. If you went back in time and meddled, you’d change the course of events that led you to be you, and thus the you you were when you jumped back in time would not exist. Movies and books can’t get around this. Remember the Harry Potter time travel sequence? If that really happened, how would they ever get past it? Wouldn’t it just keep happening, over and over again? They’d go and save Buckbeak and then Harry would save Sirius and himself from the dementors, like, forever?

Then there’s the issue of a character seeing himself in the past. A lot of people who write sci-fi operate under the limit that this can never happen. A character must avoid encounters with himself or risk annihilation, a kind of mushroom cloud of consciousness. And that does make sense. The mind just can’t go there. But the novel The Time Traveler’s Wife went there and it worked, in my opinion, because it walked right up to this conundrum. The traveler met himself regularly, even planned for it, helped himself cover up (he always shed his clothes as he traveled, so appeared naked, not the best way to travel through time or otherwise). In fact, reading that book allowed me to imagine walking side by side with my former or future self. And I think I’ve done it. More than once over the years.

The most concrete moment I can recall occurred before I had kids. I was walking home from work in November. It was just past dark, but I could still see. I can see right now the house I was passing when it happened, the porch, the overgrown lilac branches crowding me off the sidewalk. I had an idea. That is to say, words occurred to me. An opening to a poem, I thought. Was it inspiration? Not exactly. It was a statement I was making; I understood that I was speaking to someone, saying, Here is where we live. This is our neighborhood. My mind spread into two separate halves, a speaker and a listener. The listener understood that the speaker was talking to someone, a being that did not exist. A child! the other half of my mind cried. I had not yearned for a child, though I’d toyed with the idea. And suddenly, on a dark night in November, I was talking to her. “Letter to an unborn child,” I thought.

I never forgot the moment, but it took several years for me to wonder, was that a visitation? Was a future me breaking into my mind, tapping me on the shoulder, asking me to consider what was coming? It made perfect sense to me. I imagine time as a ribbon, a wide satiny path that bends back on itself as often as it stretches straight, like a river. Why not an oxbow of time? That night, some future me spoke: you will have a child. What will you say to her? What would you say right now to a child you have not yet dreamed of?

What if those urges to take out a camera to mark a moment are in fact the jaws of time opening? A future you knocking at the door of your consciousness…

I’ve been wandering through the past four weeks of spring, high on blooms and dreamy evening breezes, thunderstorms with just the right amount of violence, enough to create an edge up to which we can hold the delicacy of a perfect June afternoon, cloudless, bird-filled. I have been listening, raptly, to my future self. My daughter’s leaving grade school and I’ve been talking to my former self. Can I visit her? Can I whisper some of this in her ear? Perhaps I have, I did, I am, and I just don’t remember?

Top five Things I’d Tell My Eleven-Year-Old-Self:

5. Wear good shoes.

4. Nobody knows what’s going on. This perception you have that everyone else knows is a myth. You’ll carry this for the next twenty years of your life, needlessly.

3. Stop judging. The endless critique has got to stop. It will lead to an existential breakdown upon college graduation. You will move to the Rocky Mountain west in a sad but heroic attempt to start over, to leave behind the endless obsession with the way things ought to be. Acceptance over judgement. Gratitude over griping. Start practicing now.

2. You are not alone. You have a cheering section. Even when it feels empty, I’m sitting there. So are all your future selves. We’re the loudest in the stands. We all believe in you, even when it doesn’t feel like it. Even when you think you don’t deserve it, or that you ought to be so much more. We like how you are.

1. You know that feeling you have sometimes, not very often but sometimes, that glimpse of reassuring peace? That’s your future winking at you. Everything really is going to be okay. Your dad isn’t always happy; your mom is often troubled; nobody sings or goes crazy with joy. But there are these moments on the way home, maybe, dusk coming on, the smell of ripe corn: go with those moments. Field trips from Kindergarten. The smell of the old high school auditorium. The library on summer afternoons. Books in the hammock. Those moments, they can be trusted.