I built a time machine.
Don’t ask about the technical specificities, or the fact that the science I am using is not factual or able to be validated. Please don’t whine about the betterment of mankind, or the fact that I am not trying to save us all from ourselves.
We are already lost. That is the point to our species’ existence. It is the great punchline that no one is willing to accept. I accepted it, and so… I built a time machine.
Hypothesis: I am entangled upon myself. My past self, my future self, my current self are all three states of the same set of functions. I am more than just an observation machine built to suffer through the horrors of being. I am a fully realized uniqueness, imprinted upon the skein of reality, a frayed edge of a thread, which in turn is a part of a frayed cord, in turn, a part of a frayed coil of a universe that struggles to exist onwards towards the death of everything.
That is the science of it, the principle of how it works. I inject a massive amount of energy into my fingerprint of existence, and connect back to myself at every moment of when I am me. The furthest back I have traveled is about nine years old. Prior to that, it seems I was someone else. Kind of like me, but not. My grip on my nine year old self is barely attainable, and the amount of effort it takes me to stay in control is ludicrous. Around fourteen, I have far more control, nearly perfect, and by my mid twenties, it is no different than it is today in my sixty-four year old shell that sits before you.
Conclusion: My time machine is perfect. It works every time and I am able to change my own past however I wished. When I first started, it was small things, like how I treated someone that one time that left me with tortured late night remembrances for years afterwards. Then after that, it was my first kiss, it was a mistake, so I avoided it by politely excusing myself before it happened. I went on and on like that, reliving small parts of my life, looking at the results, and then backing up to the next moment, making small improvements, over and over, iterating through the decades of my life.
Correction: I built a time machine, and I thought it was perfect. I thought I could go back and change whatever I wanted, however I wanted. But I am human, so even now I make mistakes. I could fix those mistakes, but that leads to other mistakes. Instead of having sex for the first time with one girl, I saved it for another. But then that lead to other girls and other problems that I didn’t want to have in the first place. Entire lives popping into and out of existence, like my life is nothing more than a magic trick that no one is watching.
So I went back, and fixed it again, and again, and again. And I eventually put it right back to how it was before I started. Because I realized that I had already lost. I lost the chance when I had it, when I made the choice, the chance was discarded again and again, thrown to the wind like an errant leaf no longer caught by a wet windshield. The energy that poured into my time machine was poured into my own life, and every moment that I cherished was just as affected as every moment I loathed.
And the secret is that the vast majority of moments were not worth changing. Living is life, and life is living. Eating, drinking, sleeping, taking a shit, a shower, a walk… all those things are just moments that make up any version of myself. It is still me, it is still what I am inside. Those small moments, the critical pivot points that define who I am, those are only an abstracted insignificant fraction of the total sum of me.
Funny that so much that I thought was important, turned out not to be. The things that I held immutable and full of truth in my youth, don’t seem to matter now, as I sit here with the owl of wisdom on my shoulder. It turns out my time machine was not a machine to travel through time, it was a machine to travel through self.
Outcome: I learned a few simple things that I need you to remember forever.
- Tell your loved ones that you love them
- Don’t waste time on people that don’t value you as a person
- Make time for what matters, and what matters is family and experience
- Be a friend to all, those that return the favor, are friends worth having
Being alive is not the same thing as living. And now that I am here, on this side of the equation, I realize that it is too late for me.
But, for you, at fourteen, it isn’t. Make your own mistakes, find our own path. This is my last use of the time machine, and I am leaving the results to you, my young friend. You can be anything, go anywhere, and find happiness along the way. Because the end… it comes no matter what kind of life you live.