How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

Shen-Takayama-Furimoto Exclusion Principle. Roughly stated, it goes something like this: A self auto-dislocated by at least one-half phase shift from his own subjective present will not, under ordinary conditions, encounter any other version of his self in a controlled story space environment,

Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.

time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. If you’re not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.

If I could be half the person my dog is, I would be twice the human I am.

Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.

Everyone has a time machine. Everyone is a time machine. It’s just that most people’s machines are broken. The strangest and hardest kind of time travel is the unaided kind. People get stuck, people get looped. People get trapped. But we are all time machines. We are all perfectly engineered time machines, technologically equipped to allow the inside user, the traveler riding inside each of us, to experience time travel, and loss, and understanding. We are universal time machines manufactured to the most exacting specifications possible. Every single one of us.

The sadness was generational, accumulated like heavy elements in us, like we were large sea life, enormous ocean fish, swimming silent, collecting the sadness and moving through the deep with it, never stopping, always increasing the quantity in our bodies, always moving forward, never fully sleeping, eaters of sadness. Bite by bite, meal by meal, becoming made of sadness. Passed down like an inheritance, a negative inheritance, a long line of poor, clever men, growing, over time, slightly less poor, and slightly more clever, but never wise.

At some point in your life, this statement will be true: Tomorrow you will lose everything forever.