All Those Nostalgic Yesterdays by Martin Lochman

Time travel is not fun. It makes your life difficult. Sure, you can argue ad infinitum about its potential benefits like fixing all those mistakes you wish you never made, preventing horrible events from happening in the first place and all that romantic and noble nonsense. Or – if you are someone who’s a little bit more self-serving – you might see it as a great opportunity to become filthy rich or famous or a combination of both. But what if you can’t choose to which time you’re going to travel? What if you’re not even in control but rather an unwilling passenger?

Okay, I know I sound rather negative here but allow me to explain. Do you know how sometimes you feel very nostalgic about certain moments in your past? Let’s say you’re visiting your grandparents and your grandma prepares your favorite meal. You’re sitting at the table, eating that meal, savoring every single bit of it and its taste takes you back to when you were little. The memory becomes as clear as day and you can almost see yourself on that same chair, surrounded by your siblings and cousins all those years ago when you used to spend summers at your grandparents’ together. Now imagine that each time you recall one of these moments you are literally thrown into it against your will, not only mentally but physically as well. It doesn’t make time travel sound like much fun anymore, does it?

Believe it or not, that’s the reality of my life these days. But let me start at the beginning.

The first time it happened I was visiting mom at my childhood home – a small two-story house on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by hectares upon hectares of fields and forests. We were taking a walk through the alley lined with cherry trees that lead to the nearby river, breathing in the fresh autumn air and talking about things important and mundane – my new job at the university, busy life in the city, her small garden behind the house where she grew chives, onions, carrots and other kinds of vegetables that she used to make the best broth in the world. We also talked about dad who had passed away four years ago and whose death had hit her hard and I was happy to see her finally open up and smile after so long. We came to a stop at the end of the alley, just before a small wooden bridge and sat down to rest on an old bench that had been here ever since I can remember.

When I was a kid, maybe five or six years old, mom used to take me on the very same walk almost every day provided the weather was good. It was always in the morning when dad was at work; she had finished washing the dishes after breakfast and told me to get dressed. Then we strolled together, hand in hand through the alley until we reached the bench. We had sat there, talked and watched whatever was just going on around us – birds soaring through the blue sky, rabbits racing across the fields, airplanes taking off and landing at the city airport on the horizon.

As I sat on the bench now, nearly three decades later, listening to mom reminisce about her years with dad after I had moved to the city and watching the planes in the distance I recalled exactly how it used to feel. The complete happiness, untainted by the responsibilities of the grown-up world and life-changing decisions – that feeling grabbed a hold of my mind and for a second I closed my eyes. I was forced to open them a moment later when an entirely different sensation made the hair at the back of my neck stand up. Then something popped – like when you burst a balloon – and I was blinded by a quick flash of white light.

The next thing I knew I was holding my mom’s hand. Except it wasn’t her, at least not in the traditional sense, but rather her thirty years younger version. As I was staring at her, she was staring right back at me – for whole three seconds until she yanked her hand away from mine and screamed. Confused beyond measure I jumped to my feet and she followed suit, putting herself in a safe distance.

Once the screaming stopped, a barrage of questions followed: Where is Mark? Where is my son? Who are you and what did you do to my son? Since I was utterly clueless about what was happening I attempted to convince her it was me, I was Mark, not realizing then that in her eyes I was just some strange man claiming to be her little son. The reality of what must have been going on hit me only a bit later as she started running away and I followed her – making myself look even worse – noticing certain things that seemed out of place. Like the wooden barn that had burnt down when I was ten. The red clay tiles on the roof of our house that had been replaced with solar tiles by the time I finished college. Or the anachronistically looking police car that happened to be passing by the house and that became the final destination of mom’s panicked sprint.

Long story short, try explaining your terrified mother and a duo of very concerned police officers that you indeed are her son – even though you are the same age as her – and you just popped up in here from the future, somehow replacing your five-year old self in the process. I doubt you’ll have any more success than I had.

Naturally, the officers didn’t believe my story one bit despite the multitude of different proofs I was trying to offer: my iPhone, driver’s license issued fifteen years from now or the electronic car key. At mom’s insistence they kept asking me what I had done with the little boy and since I wasn’t able to provide a satisfactory answer they did the only thing they could – cuffed my hands and stuck me to the back of their squad car.

While I was sitting there in a very uncomfortable position – they put on the cuffs really tight – I started mulling over what would happen next. I wasn’t too hopeful that someone would actually understand my predicament so I was looking at two equally unappealing options: mental hospital or prison. Before I could decide which of them was more likely to occur – would they charge me with kidnapping of my past self for example? – the world around me popped and flashed and I was back on the bench in my own time.

Mom’s reaction to my sudden appearance was quite different from the one she had thirty years ago – or only twenty minutes ago, depending on the perspective. She jolted in surprise but almost immediately recognition and relief settled in her face. In the conversation that followed I learned exactly what happened to my younger self. It turns out that at the same moment I vanished, he materialized in my place. After the initial shock and confusion on both sides subsided they apparently had a much nicer time together than me in the past. She almost seemed saddened by his abrupt departure.

Contrary to what one would think, mom wasn’t fazed by the entire thing as if taking a trip through time was something ordinary. She has rarely mentioned it during my visits and phone calls ever since. I guess seeing – and interacting with – the five-year old me brought back some nice memories and was too precious of an experience to worry about the technicalities.

I can see that you are dying to know how and why it happened. Well, so do I. Even more so as over the course of the year following the incident at my mom’s I was thrown into the past so many times I have lost track of the exact number. Each of these jumps was different, in terms of both the length and destination and they all took place whenever I was exposed to a familiar sensory stimulus and made the conscious mental connection to its origin. It didn’t matter if it was seeing a familiar picture, hearing a favorite music band – in which case I found myself at their concert that I had visited ten years ago – or accidentally getting a whiff of perfume in the subway – which popped me back to the first date with my ex-girlfriend.

Initially, I was obsessed with trying to figure it all out. I was fairly certain that the nostalgia could be considered as the trigger but what exactly was enabling it? I delved headfirst into the world of experimental and quantum physics and when that got me nowhere – partially because I don’t have much of a background in natural sciences and the vast majority of what I researched was beyond my understanding – I had a look at popular literature and science fiction. In the end, I wasn’t any wiser and had even more questions than before with hardly any answers to them. I didn’t know if my time jumps were the result of a failed scientific experiment – perhaps at CERN since they were doing some pretty high tech research over there – that somehow affected me of all people or I have awakened a dormant innate ability to bend space-time with the power of will. The only explanation I ruled out basically straight away were aliens because I found it too far-fetched that the little green men would want to repeatedly send me back in time.

Of course nothing is straightforward when it comes to my kind of time travel. Take the paradoxes for example. One of them – running into myself in the past – is apparently prevented from occurring by switching places with my younger self. The grandfather paradox? I don’t really have to be too concerned about that one either since none of the jumps ever took me to before I had been born. I don’t think I can even go farther than my birth as there wouldn’t be anyone with whom to do the whole switcheroo.

What about changing the past and in doing so, the present? Since I physically travel into different times and interact with my surroundings including people you would think this inevitably reflects on my current reality. Yet all evidence points to the contrary: I have absolutely no recollection of ever popping into the future, my mom and others with whom I was in contact during my jumps also don’t remember any of our exchanges and there have been no reports or news anywhere of a strange man suddenly replacing a small child, teenage boy or an adolescent and then disappearing just as abruptly. It seems that as far as butterflies are concerned, I can step on as many as I want and not worry about getting back to a radically different present – if I discount whatever mess my younger selves create during that short while when I am hanging out in the past.

How is that possible? Is it the space-time or the universe protecting itself? Or is it because every time I finish my little temporal incursion a new timeline or a whole new universe are created where the other me has to deal with the consequences whereas I simply slip back into my unaltered timeline?

Once again: I. Don’t. Know.

But I would definitely welcome an explanation if you have any.

Do you see now what I meant when I said that it’s not fun? I am a time traveler yet I can’t do…anything. I can’t go back and kill Hitler or stop the World War. I can’t prevent my dad’s death. I can’t win a lottery. Hell, I can’t even stop myself from accidentally falling down the stairs and breaking my wrist a last week.

What I can do is to get used to it and try not to let it drive me crazy. Maybe avoid feeling nostalgic and sentimental so often – which is much easier said than done. Because there is always the possibility that one day it will stop as suddenly as it began or that I will eventually get the hang of it.