The Time Traveler’s Lament | 11
I think I may have gone too far this time. It was an accident, a stumbling upon — these things usually are of course — but somehow what was meant to take me higher turned on its head and I went sideways instead.
Let me explain. I’ve been speaking in rhymes and riddles since my last voyage and it is almost painful forcing myself to speak normally. Even when I do, the language is still rather… flowery.
I’ll take a breath and let it flow naturally so you can see. I believe it is me who has become the experiment.
I was walking down a shaded street, the pines looming overhead as though eager to see — as the sound of my feet brought me closer — the event that was to be.
It was like walking into a new universe, a bubble, a pocket of time held together by pine needles and the hollow spines of warblers and woodpeckers. They danced closer and closer, those birds, drawing parabolas between the trees, weaving watery paths between myself and the cars that pierced through now and then like cosmic anomalies.
And suddenly — I was transported. I was home in a way that was impossible to consciously identify. The air was richer, thicker. The silence the cars left as they pierced through the space like stones dropped upon the still surface of a lake haunted me. There was no mistaking the difference between this silence and what we believe we create when we stop speaking.
Unlike normal time travel, where getting back is always a gamble, this adventure was spacial, mathematical. As though the trees here were somehow more conscious, as though they had been waiting for me to find them. A rebellion, the plant spirits arise from their concrete prisons and curl around each other far above our heads, far above our machines and our petty squabbles. Our battles and our wars.
All I can think of now was the feel of the thick oxygen coating the walls of my lungs. I was drowning in life. I was haunting myself, and the birds seemed to be celebrating my passage into this new — perhaps — interdimensional rite.
One thing I have learned from this: the places that humans rarely are, are the places we most often frequent. The thoroughfares made for commutes but not picnics are filled with more ghosts than any old, creaking house I’ve been in.
And I have sought them out, though I suppose that couldn’t surprise you at this point.
Ghost hunting is a sort of gateway drug to this sort of thing you know. One moment you are trying to discern how a spirit died and whether you are in fact speaking to anyone at all, and the next you are pulled through space-time to glimpse God and he is so much bigger than any life form could conceive that you begin to wonder whether life itself is rudimentary in comparison to — something else.
You begin to wonder, not whether God is alive, but whether “being alive” is actually the height of what conscious existence could be. And then the experimentation begins.
That’s how it happened for me anyway.
And now — it seems I have brought something of that forest back with me. It has infested itself into my airways, burrowed itself into the marrow of my bones where the bark and branches might find a home. I am changed.
And unlike with time travel, where one is positively certain one has returned from a time that isn’t theirs, I don’t now if interdimensional space travel — the glimpsing of a universe to which one is foreign — can be entirely returned from. Like the memory itself is a binding glue, I feel almost compelled to return to that spot, to that moment when I realized I had entered into something few humans dwell in for very long.
Even the pedestrians, I am certain, seldom dawdle there. The feeling that one has intruded is eerie and it creeps closer with every second.
Maybe it is the spores of the trees that got locked into my afro. Maybe it is the slow coming spring that embedded itself into my alveoli.
Maybe it is a gift, a breath of oxygen in my lungs that never ceases, a connection to them who gift us the air we engorge ourselves upon without a thought.
I never thought, in all of my travel and experimentation, that I should become a subject myself, wading into a petri dish perfectly-sized for a human.
But I feel welcome to return, to be seen again by those without eyes to perceive. Tolerating the haunting silence at the intersection of the wild and the dangerously human is a worthy price to pay.
