Is this a thing? I feel like it must be. Everything has a hashtag these days. So I have a topic that has nothing to do with writing or reading. I’m thinking about time portals today and the ones I have in my life.
To be honest, I guess I’m just thinking about memories, but the power my mind has to bring me to the past is super strong sometimes. Today, it was just a scratch. While rolling up my sleeves to do something, I found some scratches on my arm I didn’t remember getting. It’s no mystery where they came from because I am a dog groomer. I get bruised and battered a lot, but scratches I usually remember. I groomed a puppy recently and they like to climb on my head for comfort and in the process scratch me. It wasn’t a battle in this case, just an adorable puppy I was squishing with love and I mustn’t have noticed the scratching at the time.
However, instead of thinking on the pup for long I had instant flashbacks of waking up the morning after a show to find bruises and marks from the previous night. Yeah, I’d go out dancing and jumping in pits and screaming along with everyone else in the shared euphoria of the music. It was a thing. It still is, just not much for me these days. In any case, that memory made me smile. Then SWOOSH, I’m back in time even further.
My mother is hovering over me asking me what happened to me and did I fall because my pants were torn and my leg scratched. Elbows too sometimes. I was that kid with patches on my jeans because I was always busting them open. I could never tell you how because it happened in the midst of fun. It wasn’t because I was out in the yard, the woods, or the meadow, it was because I was somewhere so far away in the land of imagination that I couldn’t even pronounce the name. That’s how I played as a kid. My parents couldn’t keep me inside, and couldn’t keep me from taking physical risks while living in my imagination out in nature.
Suddenly my dog barked and I was standing in my kitchen again, present time. It’s raining and cold, not a summer’s day, and my mom is not in the room. I did not see my friends at the show last night. My scratch isn’t from fun, it’s from work. I should be depressed. Thinking about the fun I used to have versus the work that sucks my energy away today. But it was all too real. It wasn’t just a flashback for me, I went there. A time portal sucked me back in time to visit really fun moments just for a flash. How can I not be happy about being that person who had those great times?
There are plenty of things in our lives that make us think back on the past, but how many actually take us there? It doesn’t happen to me all the time but sometimes they certainly feel more like time portals than simple memories. It may be a smell, a taste, or a moment. In this case, it was that repeated action of looking at a mystery scar not knowing when or how it arrived. Good bad or otherwise, what time portals exist for you, if any? And, to risk being on-topic, do these moments help you write?
INGRID E FABER 