10.43 Backwards Through Time

A couple weeks ago, I took the train from Ottawa to Toronto. I like taking the train, it’s relaxing, the WiFi sucks so you’re not prone to do too much work, and mostly I just read. Looked out the window lots of the time. Let the blur of the trees take me away.

When I boarded the train, I realized that I was in one of those four-seater areas, and had the window that faced the opposite way we were going. I thought these four-seaters were reserved for families and people that knew and actually wanted to talk with each other. Alas, we were four individual people, rarely acknowledging each other’s existence. Exactly the way I like it on the train.

I say almost because when I pulled out my book - Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng - and opened it up, the person facing me and sitting directly across pulled out the exact same book as me. We smiled at each other, she asked if I was enjoying it - Yes, very much so - and went to reading. Sure, this author has been a bestseller for a while, but this was her first book, and so a bit more of a deeper cut and a bit more of a coincidence.

This was comforting, allowing me to be in the same headspace as the person I was sharing the physical space with for the next four hours. We were silently seeing the same streets and listening in to the same conversations of the characters in the book.

As this nice and comforting thought lulled me into a warm state of enjoying Ng’s writing, I kept glancing out the window. It’s strange sitting on a train that is moving backwards, and I started imagining that I was in some kind of transportation device where I could travel backwards in time.

If this was an actual transportation device, and I could control my destinations, where would I go? What moments would I re-experience and potentially change? I deeply miss all the people that I no longer see, whether by losing them through death, or losing them through mistakes I or they had made. Whether they hurt me or harmed me or did something that made each of us take the extreme step of deciding never to see each other again. It’s always interesting to me that this second group of people - the ones that are still alive - are both still roaming the earth, a mere phone call or email away, and yet the gulf between us is so great that it’s as though we are dead to one another.

Would I go back not to the moment of an unbearable breakup? It’s too late by that point, the person has generally made up their mind. The series of small moments that brought that person to the edge of breaking up have already happened. Maybe there could have been small incremental changes that would have saved us both? But, would something else have just caused us to be over at some point anyway?

What about the last thing I remember saying to my father? Was it meaningful enough? Was it right? If I could think on my feet better - I’m not good at thinking on my feet - and said something more profound? Something to remember?

Then I thought about this notion of being able to actually travel back in time and why do we always think of it as the regrets? That we would return to the bad things that happened in order to change them or make them better or different. What about the good things that have happened to us? Why don’t we ever construct a time travel device where we can go back and experience the good decisions we made? Or the times that provided us with the most happiness?

I wonder about this and all the things that I might wish were different - the times of real loss or heartbreak or miscommunication or hurt - and as the trees and the rows of cornstalks and farmland blurs the faster I travel back in time, I truly ask myself - what would I have done different? What could I have said different? The truth is that whatever has happened was exactly what needed to happen at that particular moment in time. For better or for worse.

As the train pulled into Union Station.

What do I regret?
Did I say the wrong thing?
Do the wrong thing?

Non, je ne regrette rien.