Once in a Lifetime

I honestly considered it their fault and If I took precautions I wouldn’t catch it. I was smarter. Shows how much I know. Now I have the time sickness, popularly known as Nurse Ratched's Revenge.

I’ve gone back thirty years, further than I thought possible and am stuck in normal time permanently. It's ironic, isn't it? given it's the time phase I'd lost everything to avoid.

For me, normal time is tedious. Everything and everyone appears the same, changing infinitesimally from day to day. You know what they did yesterday and likely, what they’re about to do today and tomorrow. Once I did my first jump I changed perspective. The present became a cage. Woah; the things you never saw coming.

At first the cage door is open and you’re euphoric with possibilities. You can visit any point in time: MLK's speech, the Beatles at the Cavern, whatever. Standing spellbound to experience it first hand; a part of it. Some can moderate themselves, but people like me lose interest in the present and have to be elsewhere. Anywhere else; anytime but now. Just a few more short jumps, I told myself, but as the old saying goes, Once you’ve seen Paris…my mind would think of nothing else. When the NRR kicked in I found myself pacing and rattling the bars.

This time around I know where I am and when. How old am I? Nineteen? It’s a Saturday. I’m not at work. I glance down to recognize the clothes and shoes I'm wearing. I could have worn that style forever. My body is agile and weightless. It's sunny and warm. June. I fairly skip. I smell the train station, the vegetable stall, Dutch tobacco on a man passing, plastic from the record shop. 

As I pass I hear “Once in a Lifetime”; Talking Heads. Oh Lord, I’d forgotten how much I liked that song. I sing along softly ‘Let the days go by….’ My urge to skip changes to dancing, but I won’t do it in memory of my mother’s views about behaving in public. She’s been long dead, but I guess she isn’t right now. The possibility of bumping into her makes my stomach lurch. I stop walking. I remember she lived elsewhere at this time. I breathe and continue.

If I repeat everything my life will be as I knew it before I sloughed it off. Everything will be the same and I will become who I am. We all took the oath not to rock the boat, the butterfly’s wing beats sending shock waves through time until all is utterly altered, irretrievable; the paradox of me not standing here. I would be choosing suicide to do things differently.

But then I view myself as a stranger, critically and outside my body. Am I a friend? Do I love myself and want to keep who I am? If so, were there other things I could have done? Would I have been more self actuated taking different paths? I’d wanted to paint, to write, to travel more, but then doesn’t everyone? How much is pie in the sky? Perhaps I would have been useless at these things… But of course, one doesn’t know until one tries. If I’d wanted to that badly, I would have done them, wouldn’t I?

What would have stopped me? Had I or someone else built that box that I’d chosen to live in? A parts illustrator for a European car manufacturer. That’s my job. Or was. Yes, those exploded drawings you see of those thousands of little pieces with lines linking them and part numbers. It used to be all by hand when I started out. Now the drawing is done using software. The perspective and details are slightly more accurate, but the thinking, the placement, the relative way they all fit together, still has to be done, checked and overseen by humans. I haven’t picked up a drawing pen in years but they need me to make sure that people don’t go veering off the road because a tie rod assembly was missing a bolt. I used to dream about inadvertently causing accidents. Could I choose a new career without hurting anyone? Would that stop the dreams?

But there are bigger things to consider. I remember this day well. This is the morning that I meet my future lover, husband and father of my child. I am slotted into it inexorably like a train wheel on the track. I remember my eyes adjusting as I entered the bank and there he was behind the counter, the only available teller. At the counter with my bank book I’d noticed something about his eyes. I can’t remember what it was but it had thrown me, and I’d kept mine looking down at the book for a while. One thing, as they say, leads to another, and things transpired.

I remember wanting him and being grateful that he wanted me back. The first hand holding, the caress, the need for more and more of him. Perhaps I have an addictive personality, as with the time travel, the old books, the oil lamps, and the wind up robots in the wine cabinet that visitors assume do not belong to me. I lose interest but then can’t part with things. They’re mine and no-one else’s, but new different things draw my attention. Was it like that with him? Was it fair on him to be with me? I had not examined what I felt for him in years. Had it dwindled by the day? 

The row had been coming for a while, out of the blue we said afterwards, mutually shocked. But why? Couldn’t I deal with difficult things like an adult, standing my ground and explaining why it was important to do this or that so he could understand. My mind, it seemed, would not go the distance. I don’t remember any particular hills or battlefields leading to resentment if indeed there was any. After that we were on a different footing, but I did not know the new foundation between us if there was one. We had stayed together. The intense feelings for him remained inside me like a lodger that I never allowed out.

There were rumours that no matter what you did, you could not change the past; physics ruled. It all stayed on track. Was that true? How would we know?

But now, there was the river on the other side of the road, and on this side was the same newspaper seller shouting something about the Berlin wall. There are the same bicycle stands with two dangling cut lock cables. And now here on the corner is the bank. There will be a teller behind the counter. There will be something about his eyes.