Jumping timelines
Talking to my (past) self, from Liverpool, eleven years later
A couple of weeks ago, I spent the weekend in Liverpool. The last time I was there, I was eleven years younger. This time, I stayed in a hotel where time stands still, where the past was not yet lost, and the future was not yet lost. I looked in the mirror over the faux green marble formica sink, and I searched for signs of the eleven years that had passed since I last saw this city. I looked out the hotel room window and saw the same tower visible from my hotel room window in 2013. Time seemed to collapse.
Elton John once stayed in this hotel, as did David Bowie — those old stargazers. By the time I was old enough to understand the world, society had stopped looking to the sky. On a morning in mid-November in 2024, I find myself listening over and over to Land Locked Blues by Bright Eyes. “If you’re still free, start running away,” Conor Oberst sings from 2005, and I wonder if that’s true, and I wonder how long we’ve been grinding ourselves into the ground, and I turn to a video on my phone to take my mind off it. The internet astrologers are saying no election truly took place, and that seems true. Something happened, but it’s hard to call it an election. The internet witches are saying, just wait, we’re about to enter the age of the divine feminine. I wonder if that’s true. I try my absolute hardest to tap into my female intuition and gather insight into the future, but the subtext to even these innermost hopes is that I’m crazy. I give my female intuition a rest and turn instead to thoughts of the past.
Milan Kundera wrote in The Unbearable Lightness of Being that “People usually escape from their troubles into the future; they draw an imaginary line across the path of time, a line beyond which their current troubles will cease to exist. But Tereza saw no such line in her future. Only looking back could bring her consolation.” I feel like Tereza these days. I take myself back in my mind to that hotel room in Liverpool and try to summon the self I was on the second day of November. As I write this, that was ten days ago. I try to project myself ten days into the future, and it’s hard to imagine a cessation to my current troubles, but perhaps there will be, if the witches and the astrologers are right.
In 2013, my sister and I told each other ghosts stories in our Liverpool hotel room. In 2024, I tell my husband I think our room must be haunted. It looks like exactly the kind of room that would be, with the panel moulding on the walls and the bathroom with only a bathtub, no shower. We go down to breakfast for the full English buffet, and Jack jokes that we’ve gone back in time. The breakfast room does, indeed, feel like some ghostly relic from the middle of the last century.
I wish I were living in the past — I don’t know if I wish I were living in my personal past, or if I wish I were living in society’s past. I imagine myself as a hotel guest in the 60s, eating this same full English buffet. I wonder if I would have been less stressed out. I wonder if I would have felt less pressure to perfect, to prepare, to wait for ideal circumstances to move, to act. I wonder if I would have seen a clearer path to what I’m supposed to be. I wonder if I would have felt less fear. That’s how I’ve always thought about the past. I’ve always imagined that if I could just be transported back, I would see everything clearly. This is the comfort Tereza seeks in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and it’s the comfort I wish I felt now. It’s the comfort of knowing how events play out.
In Saving Time, Jenny Odell wrote, “The co-creation of events of our lives do not play out in external, homogenous time. They are the stuff of time itself. Grasping this fully can be like the moment you have a conversation you’ve rehearsed in your head. Your rehearsal can never be complete because your imagination was missing not only the person you’re talking with, but yourself in each moment - the person changing and responding as the conversation proceeds.” Maybe my past self is talking to my present self. She’s sending signs, drawing my attention to that building with the two towers that we looked at all those years ago. She’s reminding me that my self from eleven years ago, complete with all her naive hopes, is still in me, somewhere.
Go ahead, talk to her. She’ll tell you what you need to know.
You go back to the weekend in Liverpool. You went to a pub with a vegan Sunday roast and porcelain dolls sitting on the windowsills and a live jazz band. It felt like kind of place you would come all the time. Two girls (women) sat at the adjacent table. “Do you like horror movies?” one asked. I was wearing my witchiest black velvet-and-lace dress, which must have tipped them off. I said that I do. They invited me to a horror movie night, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them I don’t live in Liverpool, and I wished I could attend. These must be the seeds of community, that elusive thing.
You go back further — eleven years. You were stressed about a final presentation for your master’s degree, and you felt pressured to work, when all you wanted to do was immerse yourself in the city around you. You knew you were leaving the UK later that summer, leaving for good, you thought, yet at the back of your mind, something in the energy of Liverpool was telling you that you weren’t done with this country, not yet. And less than a year later, you would weave imagery from that trip into your applications for British PhD programs. It felt almost like destiny.
Now, on a morning in November of 2024, that not-too-long-ago weekend has faded to black. The 2013 trip has faded to black. I feel scared and alone. I tell myself I’m lucky to be in London. I worry about my family back in Michigan. Horror images — real horror, not movie horror — of what might be lying in wait pass through my mind. I turn back to myself from last weekend — that little optimist so excited by the idea of forming a community. I see my 23-year-old self, gradually taking hold of what she wanted to learn in the world. Yet looking back at both of them, I see their limitations. I see how they moved through the world with — fear of what, they couldn’t even say. I see now what was on the other side of that nameless dread. My past self looks at me, and I look at her. She has that aura of past certainty about her. She looks at me. “You’re ready,” she says.