The Bureacracy Of Time Travel
Unexpected echoes from a pandemic, old connections, and buried trauma collide—showing how time can trap us in moments we thought were gone.
In 2019, I matched with someone on a dating app. We were having a great conversation, which in itself was surprising. Trying to find anything (companionship, laughter, connection, fun, attraction) via the interwebs designed to turn human response into capitalist touchpoints – is counterintuitive. What made it extra surprising was, that this was one of three conversations, great conversations that began on that day.
This is just one of the things that makes me believe that all my rational thought & scientific education is but a mere conceit and that things work in fundamentally inscrutable ways, beyond human comprehension (or at least, mine). All three conversations were moving along in that exciting volley of jokes & pop culture references while negotiating a chessboard of unseen intentions & murky needs. Then one of them took a very unexpected turn.
I should tell you, he said, we have met before. Oh no, my heart sank, thinking of a profile that matched with me only to tell me that we’d gone on one date before (which I’d completely forgotten). And another that used this very line to accelerate us into a couple of great dates before he ghosted me & I discovered he was married & a parent. Being visible, especially as a woman makes your world simultaneously smaller & more dangerous. A part of me sighed internally, and we were having such a good time.
It turned out that we had been part of the same social circle a decade ago, the naescent, fledgling group that would go on to become Mumbai’s prolific live performance scene (comedy, music, poetry being the unholy trinity). Another suckerpunch to my gut. That’s where I met the abusive ex. Along with that came a flood of memories. The heady cocktail of people with SOMETHING to say, youthful hormones and clashing social interactions. Above it all, an overwhelming waterfall of shame. I wish I could cauterise the source of this bad decision & uproot it from my life once and for all. It has informed a whole decade of my life and I’m tired of it.
Now, years later, I’m still connecting the dots. The conversations I’ve had with this person before. The rooms we’ve been in at the same time. The experiences we’ve been a part of, together-apart in that uniquely urban creatives way. The references we share. The people we share. The times we have shared. I am doing this by extrapolating, digging deep into the archives of my mind & my digitalia. It isn’t coming back to me the way memory usually does, alive (and often unwelcome) and jostling its way into the front of my attention. Instead, it feels like I’m reading a book written by somebody else and recognising descriptions of me.
How does one forget ten years? That too, one such as me, a hoarder of nostalgia? I can only put it down to what we now call trauma. Everything hurt too much (still does) then. And the only way I could breathe, salvage myself from the wreckage was to cut it all away.
I was not in the right frame of mind to be surgically precise about this. There was too much gaslighting, too much shaming for me to do anything but to cut away the entire world at that time and leave only the part of me that breathed. With that had to go even the musclature that mobilised me, the bones that supported me. I rebuilt all of that, this time stronger, more flexible.
Where do I fit the parts that used to be me but not as good for me, now? The thing is, my flexibility is made for places & objects and as they were in 2012. People though, have changed, learnt, hardened, softened, broken, evolved, weakened. Yet, our histories are an important part of us. And I’m now at a disproportionate junction of having no history of a person while they have a ten year history of me. It’s odd. And we were having such a good time, indeed. Pretending to be random strangers, pretending words are just chesspieces & can go into a box when we’re finished, pretending victories are not bloody and losses don’t last forever.
The last couple of months have been rife with blasts from the past. I guess the pandemic has made us all more self-aware than we ever were, pushing us to complete things we left untended, clinging to people & notions that we took for granted. I give it till the end of this year only. Humanity is incredibly fickle and forgetful and shallow. Maybe that’s the same as resilient. We can’t sanely go on forever fearing agonising death by an invisible virus. We find our ways to make peace with it and that includes, continuing to take some things for granted, letting ourselves be messy & less than vigilant. It’s just too exhausting being watchful all the time.
Yet, this is an abundant time, not in the throes of pain as we were in 2021, freshly buoyed by vaccines & a return to normalcy but not yet jaded enough to let go of our “If I survive, I’ll do this” promises. I’m finding lessons (don’t I always?) in these flashbacks & remember-me messages. I am not as wounded as I was when we last left things as we left them. And like everyone else, I’m just two steps from the gaping perspective of a global pandemic. Whatever happened could not have been the worst thing to happen to me.
I’m still unsure if the pandemic is the worst thing to have happened to me (cancer twice in the family, sexual assault, prolonged domestic violence are all vying for that dubious trophy). So I take a utilitarian route and think of which of these I could have done without and still reached the evolution I did.
Assault & violence come to mind. The violence is more recent (or rather its most recent manifestation is closer in my history) and I feel like I’m still uncovering its effects. I have lost a decade of productivity, of compatibility with human beings (I’ve been so scared to form friendships, let alone romantic relationships). And I’m so angry that I’ve also lost from the past, slices of my memory just gone.
This is not a thing that other people seem to understand when they push me to ‘get over it‘ or get angry that I’m apparently still hung up on an awful ex or impatient that I’m taking so long to get on the same timeline as them. I am not averse to reunions. But a reunion will never be a fresh start. There is no such thing. You cannot go back and be a baby being born all over again. That’s just a metaphysical impossibility.
A reunion is different. It could be a fresh way forward but it has to start with a regurgitation of what was, an understanding of what it’s not anymore. We can never go back to who we were before the pandemic. But we can also never forget that we were those people and that a pandemic occurred.
Recovery means we have to cover everything that has already been before we proceed. I’m sorry it’s taking me so long to do that. And while we are tussling over who remembers what and what is worth even remembering, we’re causing new ripples and writing new histories. I can only hope I’m here for it all this time.