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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, like Adam in the Garden of Eden calling a spade a spade or whatever happens in Genesis.
To belong, the hypothesis suggested, is to have a stake in the status quo.
Ideas are frictional, factional entities which wilt when pinned to flowcharts. Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions.
This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.
“Belief has very little to do with rationale. Why demand a map for uncharted territory?”
But it was also a wonderful, simple, human terror. The one where death brushes too close to you and you abruptly remember what an insane gift it is to be alive, and how much you’d like to stay alive even when death is laughing at your window, laughing in your mirror.
The truth is, it won’t get better if you keep making the same mistakes. It can get better, but you must allow yourself to imagine a world in which you are better.
Don’t enter believing yourself a node in a grand undertaking, that your past and your trauma will define your future, that individuals don’t matter.
The most radical thing I ever did was love him,
Forgiveness, which takes you back to the person you were and lets you reset them. Hope, which exists in a future in which you are new. Forgiveness and hope are miracles. They let you change your life. They are time-travel.
