The Ministry of Time

by Kaliane Bradley

To begin with, the language experiment had a chilly, near-sensual thrill. There’s something vengeful about agreeing on an interpretation. Set your narrative as canon and in a tiny way you have pried your death out of time, as long as the narrative is recalled by someone else.

This was one of my first lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.

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. It’s the same with oppression. You don’t gain any special knowledge from being marginalized. But you do gain something from stepping outside your hurt and examining the scaffolding of your oppression. You’ll find the weak joints, the things you can kick in. When I look back at myself on the bridge year, I see that I thought I was doing something constructive, escaping exploitation by becoming exceptional. In fact, what I was doing was squeezing my eyes shut and singing la la la at the gathering darkness, as if the gathering darkness cared that I couldn’t see it.

The great project of empire was to categorize: owned and owner, colonizer and colonized, évolué and barbarian, mine and yours. I inherited these taxonomies. This, I think, was the reason I played fuck-about-Fred with my ethnic identity as much as I could. “They” are still in charge and even when “they” are saying marginalized instead of mongoloid they are still acknowledging that we are an issue to be dealt with.

“I can’t manage it exactly without a sextant,” he said. “But I wanted to be able to orient myself.” “So that, in the event of London flooding when the ice caps melt, you can sail to safer waters?” “So that I will know where I was when I met you.”

I was filled with happiness, so enormous and terrifying it was as if I’d committed a crime to get it.

There was no way that anyone could feel this much without also knowing they were going to lose it.

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.