Time Travel
We went over to our tenants’ house in LA last night for dinner and drinks, and they got me way too stoned. I rarely smoke weed these days, so my tolerance is low, and I had had four or five drinks too. After a while I was unable to socialize, so I took a stroll around the house.
Our tenants rented the house furnished, but over the last five years they’ve had us remove some of it. Still, almost all my old books are in the built-ins, and the art Heather bought when she was living in Argentina is mostly hanging in its exact place. From some angles, it was as though I were back in my LA house, where we had lived for four years (2012-2016.)
In my altered state, I started imagining it were 2015, and that the last seven years — living in Berlin and Lisbon — were just stray thoughts, a detailed daydream. We were still living in LA, and when I turned the corner, I’d see four-year old Sasha wanting to play with her wooden blocks.
It was the closest I could come to time travel. For what is time except the accumulation of memories, and you only know which memories go where due to the one-way chain of causation, i.e., that causes beget effects and not the other way around. The memories, though, are merely information gleaned from one’s senses, and their content and ordering, i.e., time itself, is dependent on the input therefrom.
If you could create a sensory experience in the present virtually identical to one in the past, you could theoretically re-link to that past moment, content-wise, and re-experience the same effects that flow from it. In other words, once you get back to an identical enough sensory place, you’d just pick up where you left off, like re-opening a book you had put down the night before.
I actually don’t want to be back in that LA house, and I am glad we’ve lived in Europe the last six years. I am happy our tenants are enjoying it and being a guest was good enough. But it was worthwhile to time travel for a few moments, if only to realize that the past is where it should be, and I can leave it where it is.