Straight & Fast

Sometimes we have these extremely important, formative moments in our lives. They say “you can’t go back again,” but that isn’t always true. The arrow of time only points in one direction, but you can do a lot of looping around if you care to.

One particular way of circling back that I find very meaningful is to re-read the most influential books of my past. I have always been deeply affected by books. For a while I thought that might have only been an artifact of my youth, but even as an adult I’ve found certain books can just utterly change my core.

When I re-read those books, an interesting thing happens. I time travel. I find an earlier version of myself walking around the same labyrinth I’m lost in, and we can talk for a time. I am not him and he is not me. I am shaped by things he has not yet experienced, and he still has things that I have lost, for good or ill. I am not an upgrade over him, but nor am I him, deteriorated. We are just different. The one advantage I do have is that I can learn from him, even though he can’t learn from me.

Doubling back through the maze, using those books as the string and breadcrumbs to retrace my steps, I can find him. We can talk for a while. We can experience the same thing, overlapping for a moment or two or however long it takes for me to read those same words again. I can both feel the the emotions they caused in him and the ones they cause in me. I can catch glimpses of how those words might have changed in meaning if they’d found me for the first time at another first time altogether.

After this meeting, we’ll both go back to wandering about in the labyrinth. I know he’s going back to looking for a way out. He wants to defeat the maze, he’d knock down the walls in passion and fury if he could, he’d cheat and rage and find his exit, straight & fast, just to prove that nothing could hold him if he didn’t want it to.

I choose the labyrinth. I’ll find new hallways and I’ll find old ones anew. I’ll find other people who are lost and other people who don’t mind. Crooked & slow, I’ll meander.