Autonoetic

Time can be described in a myriad of ways. That's the best part of creative works, the way they enable one's perception of time to speed up or slow down depending on... well, just circumstance, truly. When someone is bored out of their skull at work, time appears to drag on and on for ages, eons, moments stretching to feel eternal as the clock drags its metaphorical feet.

Words don't exactly exist to describe subjective perceptions of time, that's one problem that makes time travel literature so hard for one-way travelers of timelines to comprehend. Most passengers in this world have a one-way ticket, only able to travel in the direction headed towards their own ending, which may be why so much art and literature and energy is focused on life's beginnings, on looking backwards fondly. Nostalgia fuels many careers, from children's literature to live action remakes nobody really admits to liking to the anti-aging industry.

To not have a one way ticket, to be able to move backwards as well as forwards not metaphorically but literally, to interact with someone you know to be dead but they're not dead while the two of you are talking, while her head is on your shoulder, to be able to kiss someone you know is dead and yet her lips are undeniably alive against yours, that's - words fail to describe the maelstrom of emotions that experience brings. And yet, words are all one has to describe them. Unless one willingly allows the experience to drift back into the void of memories, guarenteed to eventually disappear, but this time traveler never did that. This time traveler put their experiences into words, for fear of otherwise losing them.

Words were all one had to describe the emotions, and the very fact that tenses mix(ed) themselves up shows why time ought to only move in one direction. But the way the universe ought to work and the way it did were not identical realities. The fact death was still inevitable even when one could reverse time's direction, change course, interact with the deceased as once they return to a certain point in the timeline there simply wasn't any other option but for entropy to ensue, order return to the natural state of chaos. For a time traveler, chaos was home, was where they belonged more than any specific epoch.

All a time traveler could ever have in the end were words, once their time traveling was finished. Once she was again gone, unable to be revived as the traveler had returned to that specific moment so often that, like a movie whereupon scene selection had been used too often, efforts to return to when she was alive eventually just ended in the time traveler watching their beloved friend die repeatedly. Letting time move forward at that point was self care, whereas continuing to retreat to that specific past eventually began to feel more like self harm than an effort to maintain memories of the girl the time traveler once knew. Yes, by the time the traveler had no choice but to let their best friend die, their first kiss whose kiss they had happily relived at least a dozen times, six of those times being ones the girl also had actually experienced alongside them rather than being a memory. Songs about being a memory eventually became more than mere metaphor to the time traveler, who would cry and mourn far more than anyone else, as they had grieved this death so many times and yet it never truly healed.

Knowing what someone else had actually experienced as opposed to what their future self or a self from a parallel timeline had was difficult for our time traveler to keep track of, even though they had multiple documents on their phone listing who had been through what when with them. The fact that the time traveler was genderfluid, that who they appeared to be to others also changed alongside who others were to them and when they were together and what relationships existed within the expanse of existence between the time traveler and any other one way traveler whose time they momentarily visited, only added to the chaotic confusion. The girl who had been the time traveler's first kissed had even asked, at the time "so, will you be becoming my boyfriend or girlfriend today?" And that first day, that first kiss, the answer had been girlfriend, and the second had been partner, the last kiss they had shared had been between the girl and her boyfriend, a boy who had already mourned her death so many times yet still found their energy returning to when she was around, when that question could still be answered in the present tense.

Time travel thrives in chaos, in unpredictability, in paradoxes. Time travelers, however, rarely thrive(d) at all. Failure to thrive, an ironic diagnosis considering how often it was typically used to describe premature births as opposed to the creatures who could return a premature birth back into a pregnancy. Would they be throwing out too much information by admitting they had been a premature birth, before time travel was ever even a concept, nevermind a reality? No, they didn't develop the ability to time travel until they had developed abilities to travel physically through space first. Time travel involved physical travel as well, a chaotic process the time travler still failed to accurately put into words. Meanwhile, generally, time travelers were failures at mentally thriving.

That was not a trait unique to time travelers, although others who failed to thrive in their own supernatural existences were similar to time travelers in that time moved differently for them than for ordinary people. Immortality, for example, made nothing truly matter, had vampires willingly waltzing out into sunlight eventually as what was the point? Life unending was life bereft of any true meaning. After all, the most memorable part of a story was usually its beginning or end, and immortals eventually lost the ability to remember let alone discuss their own beginnings, origins, unless of course they recorded it somewhere. Recording one's life did tend to interfere with actually living said life, although immortality ought to have removed any pressure surrounding losing time.

A time traveler, unlike an immortal, still did have to reckon with losing time to the effort of recording what they changed or returned to or who they encountered, as a time traveler still did have a finite number of days on planet Earth. They just had no way of knowing how numbered those days were, unlike ordinary people whose lives moved in straight lines, who knew at best they had a century. When one's life instead loop de looped through years, moved backwards before returning forward, the amount of time within one's life felt significantly more than it likely would be, which was probably a gift, just one no time traveler had enough external perspective to truly appreciate.