Time Travel II

It has been a few years since I wrote about time travel. It was in an essay. A good topic to revisit this weekend, in the glowing solstice shadow, because of a photo --taken by my brother exactly 43 years ago-- of two young people who touched lives, joined ways, and to that touch entrusted all their days.

In that essay, I wrote this: "There is a freedom in restraint. Perhaps it comes from gradually concerning ourselves less and less with the good opinion of young people. The reasons we older people go about things need in no way trouble them. Let's consider that a prime directive." Now I write such paragraphs, but once we were young: we were the young people about whom such paragraphs were written. How did we do it? How did we navigate adversities, dodge and not dodge the blows of the world? I don't remember.

We should have worn helmets.

Time machines are dangerous and not precisely self-contained. There are extensions and linkages that cannot be seen all at once, belong to no particular moment and can only be deduced by their effect upon us later. From this remove, it is easy to forget the vast reserves of temporal energy we kept in those days, the promise of it --and I accept that. But there's one thing I can't quite reconcile with photographic evidence: for some silly reason I remember us being in color.