Time travelling
Happy new year.
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Another year is ending. I’ve packed and unpacked my suitcase about twenty times. I’ve spent an obscene amount of money on plane tickets and train tickets and clothes I definitely can’t afford. I live in a new neighbourhood now. My immigration status in the UK is shaky again. This Substack is supposed to be about the TV shows I’m watching but I haven’t watched anything worth writing about.
I’m choosing to be a reliable narrator, so I must confess: for better or worse, it feels like I’ve lost more than I’ve gained this year. Things have changed, other people have changed, I’ve changed. I think I’m still changing? Eleven months ago my therapist told me it will all make sense one day but it’s December and it all still doesn’t make any sense so she told me the same thing again last week. I’ve finally accepted that life, if you’re living it authentically, is always full of joy and always full of grief, likely all at the same time.
In 2022, I found out I live with a perceptual phenomenon called time-space synaesthesia. It means I can sort-of see time around me. Research on the various forms of synaesthesia is still evolving, but studies to date have shown that individuals with this type are able “to experience time units (such as months of the year) as idiosyncratic spatial forms, and report that these forms aid them in mentally organising their time.”
Imagine that I’m standing in front of you inside a non-edible translucent donut that contains twelve blocks to represent twelve calendar months. I can move the blocks forward and backward to reach the month or year I want, or need, to remember.
My synaesthesia means that my memory is a little better than the average person’s and that I’m perpetually nostalgic. This is sometimes Very Good and Very Bad. I yearn to live within walking distance of my friends again. Supercuts of my pre-pandemic life in New York City barrel through my mind every time I listen to Olivia Dean’s first EP. My family and I keep trying to recreate the six months we spent together in lockdown when it was just the three of us but it’ll never be like that again. When it hits me that none of it is ever coming back the panic shoots me straight in the chest, stops me in my tracks. A thousand exit wounds all over my beating heart.
It’s debilitating because I’ve always felt like a pseudo time traveller, but also like I can play God. Whenever I’m experiencing a moment of joy, I can pause time to take a mental video so that I’ll be able to re-live everything later in excruciatingly vivid detail. Because if the past can be good, then I can hold onto hope that the future will be good, too, right? When I’m at my lowest, I manipulate time to return to moments I regret and I stay there and I change everything in my head. Then I fast-forward time and live through all the fake scenarios where it turns out okay in the end. It’s fun, foolish, to pretend I have control over any of it.
My university flatmate lost her life last month. I haven’t seen her in seven years but she crosses my mind every time I talk about my Durham days. We didn’t message often but she would always wish us a happy new year, every year, on the first of January. She was funny and brave and always so unapologetically herself. She was a writer, too.
I read the news of her passing on Instagram, of all places. I stood in my living room in shock, and then I stood there in grief, and then I pressed the rewind button on my three-dimensional time calendar and it rotated backwards ten times.
Ten years ago. I’m right back in our dorm room kitchen and it’s snowing outside and we find out neither of us has ever seen snow fall so gently like this. I move time forward a bit and we’re in that dingy Durham house, making scrambled eggs and chatting shit about a niche Norwegian TV show we’re both obsessed with. I move time forward a little more and it’s a few months until graduation and I’m walking down the stairs at 2am to go to the bathroom and she’s there in her pyjamas on the sofa, asleep in the arms of the man she would end up marrying, their love story unfolding right in front of my eyes.
But it’s not ten years ago, it’s right now. It’s today. But I still think maybe if I press the rewind button again, if I run even faster across all the blocks on my time-wheel, if I can visualise her clearly enough I think I could walk straight into those moments and actually stay there, linger a little longer, change something big or small so her future is different.
If we’re lucky, our lives will be long and there will be so much time. But we might not be lucky, so I’m asking you to please go after what you want right now, today. Our lives might be short so pick up the phone and call me, or I’ll call you, and we’ll wish each other a happy new year. You’ll tell me about all the things you want to let go of and all the things you want to gain. I will listen and I will tell you to go break some rules, to book that plane ticket, to reach out again, to risk it all for love. To regret nothing and to regret everything. To be joyful, and to grieve.
I will tell you to make all of it work somehow and I will tell you to make sure your future self feels nostalgia for all of it one day, because I think nostalgia means you’ve lived through moments worth remembering — moments worth travelling back in time for.1
Lillian, this post is dedicated to you. Happy new year. Rest easy.