I watched The Time Traveler’s Wife on HBO, and I cannot get this conversation out of my head:
Henry (the time traveler): You know what’s good about being sad?
Clare (the wife, age 6? 7?): Nothing.
Henry: Happy people are all the same, but sad people are all different.
I’ve been stuck on these words because I think they are dangerous. They perpetuate the stereotype that sadness and trauma make us unique, interesting and special. Whereas happiness, being content and joy make us bland, ignorant and dull. I can speak with authority on these states because I’m currently a sad person right now. For 2021, it is my default state. I am also a time traveler who is stuck in a perpetual loop like Henry of revisiting my current griefs.
Before I get into that, let’s jump back to Henry who is a time traveler. The reason he is sad—aside from the time travel—is that he witnessed his mother get decapitated in a car accident as a young child. The only reason he didn’t die is that he time traveled out of the vehicle just in time. However, throughout his life, he time travels back to that exact moment. He re-witnesses his mother dying from every angle imaginable, and he is always helpless to stop it. He literally can not move on.
The time travel doesn’t help, too; these are the rules that affect his journeys:
He sticks around his own time period.
He can appear in the times and locations of those he loves even if he hasn’t met them yet. This is the logic by which he meets his wife, Clare, as a child, years before they meet in real life.
He appears naked and vulnerable when he travels; he can’t take anything with him.
He never knows when or where he’ll go—future, past, hot, cold, inside, outside, friend or foe
Overall, Henry doesn’t appreciate anything time travel does for him; he thinks it’s scary. But he says the future is even scarier to him. Because with the future you must be all in, and there is nothing more terrifying to Henry—a man who must relieve his greatest sadness forever—than hope.
Author’s Note: I’ll stop here because I can’t figure out if this is a crônica or a longer piece. In writing land, sometimes you just got to let this gestate inside you. But thought I’d share how this has really made me think a lot about time travel this year. Especially with the loosening of pandemic restrictions. I feel like everything gives you this sense of time jumping. Just this past weekend, I went out with a friend to an Italian restaurant. Here are multiple things that occurred that haven’t happen in up to four years:
Hanging out with her in a restaurant inside at a table AT NIGHT!
Us getting to hanging out one on one
Me driving to her house to pick her up and go to Venice Beach, CA - WHAT??!?!?!
Us dressed in clothes that haven’t seen the outside since the beginning of the pandemic
We both agreed that it’s not just that time has passed. But that we can look at now and then—our last trip like this in 2014 probably—and say with all certainty we were two completely different people. In this, life has been like time travel—because we forgot who those two people were, what their lives were like, and what they dreamed until we re-walked this specific path.