#nonlinear time

There is a tree growing between broken ruins. This tree once flowering, now withering away. It's roots are still standing strong, embracing every broken stone it finds. Now withering, it awaits it's fate. Ending up in ruins, or gifting it's fruit once more.

There is a garden, isolated between the clock's ticks. Hiding a secret no one wants to see. A beautifull castle, standing embracing this garden. Garding the garden from within. Embraced by the scenery of this garden.

There is an apple laying in a wooden basket. This apple once united with it's life gifter, now laying there amongst others. As ticks of the clock pass, waiting it's fate. Is it the start of a new begin, or the end of what has started?

There is a castle, hiding a secret. A secret even time doesn't dare touch. A young sapling sprouting in it's court. Once a seed now a new begin born from an end that started beyond the ticks.

There is a seed, waiting at the core. Trapped between layers it can not escape. Awaiting it's fate, awaiting with potential no one knows where to seek.

The meaty texture of my first kill lingers in my mouth. I’ve allowed myself to be drawn into this moment, the first time hearing the Gods refer to my cellmates as “toothsome”, a word in Godspeak that eluded my understanding. I remained in my corner of the room, the others giving me a wide berth. We were born to different fates and theirs holds front and center of my mind.

It blurs together, that moment, the feel of the kill, flesh parting under my jaws, screams filling my ears, the wet feeling of blood running down my arms, my chin. Finding my cellmates and my first kill were tied, intrinsically linked together in fate. Thinking of one brought the other to the fore, always and forever.

Other thoughts are tied to the first kill. Re-shaping flesh, both mine and God-flesh. A blade wielded in self defense carving through an arm as the other struck the God, claws parting the flesh at their throat and sinking into the wall behind them. The uttered sounds of my fellows and the stares as I had removed the arm, meat desperately clinging to itself as it was slowly wrenched free. It would be 6, 362, 250 seconds before the arm would reform to a level of use. The feeling of explosive expansion as I was born, meat bursting forth from my small form to become me. Fed by a series of tubes plugged into a reservoir, it had taken me 321 seconds to empty the reservoir, growth forcefully halted by scarcity.

With an exertion of will I drag myself from the thoughts. 85, 536, 704 seconds between being left alone in the cell, to the first kill. I don’t believe the gods had no concept of what they did when they made me, they seemed to treat me as they did the other experiments. Loading us full of chemicals to make us forget the torturous work they did on us, not understanding how their work on my mind had created me. They meddled beyond their comprehension. A child of their kind, taken and warped. They gave me the form to usher their downfall. I was grown tall and rippling with muscles, legs extended, claws grown. A beast beyond what the Gods beyond the facility could imagine, towering over them, carving through them.

548, 367 seconds before I left the cell they injected me with a substance, growing my muscles more powerful, the final experiment they subjected me to. I bent the bars of my cell open, tearing muscles from bone and limping away, 74, 565, 421 seconds until the damage healed. For the Gods, it was the beginning of their end.

Cities, awash with blood. The substance flowing through the streets. Myself and those who followed me stalking through the region, moving to the small pockets of life, and drinking deep of it, to nourish us for our travel to the next. My final day. Sitting atop a hill and looking at one of the few remaining pockets of Gods. They shivered deep in their fortified grounds. One of their manors, built with pleasure in mind more than defense. But they had tried, small walls surrounded the place, Gods walking their span, illuminated by the light of the Moon high above us all.

We loped down the hill, my allies gathering speed as we neared the wall. 634 seconds until my death. The first warning the Gods had was our screams and yells. Hundreds of throats that had been under the boot of the Gods their whole lives screaming with abandon as we sought to remove unworthy creators from our world.

522 seconds. We hit their wall like an avalanche, knocking the pitiful thing to the ground as their weapons opened on us.

401 seconds. Blood once again coated me. Their security forces had been overwhelmed, weaponry smashed upon the ground. Now, all that was left was to scour the grounds of the remaining Gods.

31 seconds. A score of Gods had tried to stop me entering the vault. Armed with little more than their fists, and armoured with cloth, they had succeeded only in slathering me in blood and meaty gore.

10 seconds. I strain against the door of the vault, tearing it free from its hinges and leaving only inky blackness behind.

1 second. A pair of eyes open deep within the vault, moving towards me before I can react to stop them.

Once, I opened a screen door and stepped onto the porch of a house in the countryside, on a hot night somewhere humid and tropical. It was dark enough that I could make out only the outlines of shapes, and yet no stars shone. My head burned and my back ached with fever, made worse by the deafening noise of the crickets, and yet rather than return to my sweat-soaked mattress, I slid the door closed behind me and sat on the porch steps. The dewy grass was cool on my feet. Something foreboding was happening. 

Later, or perhaps, earlier, we, a small group, will walk down a hill to the harbourfront. Not the nice promenade type; miles of empty parking lot and industrial dockworks. Something terrible will happen in the world – the type of terrible, unmitigated disaster which provokes a blank response, emotionless, as one attempts to grapple with the weight of the situation; the type of sobering news to which the only acceptable response is sitting down, sparking a lightly-filtered cigarette, something harsh and foreign, and putting one’s head in one’s hands. An apocalyptic climate event, perhaps, or thermonuclear annihilation. We will not be able to stop looking at the sky with morbid fascination. 

At different times, in different contexts, we’ve talked about time travel. Not in scientific terms, mind you, but in personal ones. Something like going back in time and telling your younger self an important thing.

Those books “If I’d Known Then” and “What I Know Now” are a bit of what I’m talking about: letters to a younger self. Only what we were talking about was literally talking to a younger self. Back to the Future style. Going back in time.

The way Kimmer sees it, our motion through time is neither strictly nor continuously linear. Meaning... we can move back and forth through it. We can jump about. And we can address our younger selves along the way.

And the reason  we can do this isn’t because of actual time travel... it’s because we are, each of us, the sum of our earlier selves. And those earlier selves are sometimes very distinct presences in our lives. Not in a metaphysical way but through memories. Through conditioned responses. In specific feelings. In triggers of sight, sound, or smell. In our preferences and biases. In our subconscious. In variations of PTSD. In a lot of different ways, actually... our earlier selves are still there.

They inform us.

We were talking about all this because our present — hers, mine, and yours — is the expression of our past. And the thing is... any number of bruises and scars are back there. Our traumas are back there, too. And everything in between.

We were talking about all this because it’s also a feature of our brains, our minds, our mental ability that we can visualize ourselves in the here and now talking to some version of ourselves in the past. It’s also a feature of our brains, our minds, our mental ability that we can provide comfort or context or wisdom to that earlier self. And that the fruit of such comfort or context or wisdom that we can provide then ripples forward.

To the present.

It really is mind-blowing... the things your mind can do to you. And the things your mind can do for you.

And all this — time travel, earlier selves, and comfort — all of this is just my brain’s way of reminding me that the people I meet are similarly these walking, talking complexities. They’re expressions of their personal past. And that it’s within my ability to reinforce traumas and scars and bruises... or I can reinforce something else.

Something more helpful, maybe.

At the very least... I can choose not to reinforce traumas and scars and bruises. I can choose not to reinforce conditioned responses. I can choose to be off. script.

And I can choose to see people as more than just the slice of them that I meet in the here and now. I can choose to see them as the more I know they are.

The more... we all are.

Anyway.

At different times, in different contexts, we talk about time travel.