The Ministry of Time

by Kaliane Bradley

“You make the navy sound like the priesthood,”

I sensed retribution judiciously withheld, and I was bitterly grateful for her restraint.

They fed us all poison from a bottle marked “prestige,” and we developed a high tolerance

We make irrevocable decisions every day. A twelve-second delay, a slip of the tongue, and suddenly your life is on a new road.

You can’t trauma-proof life, and you can’t hurt-proof your relationships. You have to accept you will cause harm to yourself and others. But you can also fuck up, really badly, and not learn anything from it except that you fucked up.

But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaffolding of your oppression. You’ll

so anxious about conflict he hoarded decade-old parking tickets?

The truth was that we were shackled to the idea that the orders were good and the job was good.

There were some things about sleeping with a Victorian naval officer that didn’t surprise me, and there were others that astonished me.

But I wrote it down because I need you to bear witness to it. He was here, by and with and in my body. He lives in me like trauma does.

If you ever fall in love, you’ll be a person who was in love for the rest of your life.

was also nursing fragile joy.

he’d taken the woman I could have become with him.

The requiem that has been playing in the background of everything I do since 2018: Mourning the woman I could have been and the girl I used to be before my life turned on its head. Bradley does an incredible job trapping this grief in petrified amber: who would I be if “such and such” never happened to me, or if I made different choices?

I know how much you’ve longed for your future to lean down and cup your face, to whisper “Don’t worry, it gets better.” 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.

I can see how wrong my choices were. Don’t do it like this. Don’t enter believing yourself a node in a grand undertaking, that your past a...

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.