Great Hoboes of New York

Lost in Time

by Gareth Edel

I was chatting with a friend and saying I needed something to write about to distract myself from the present, and he suggested being lost in the past. I don't know if he meant, in a science fiction or Donnie Darko sense, or perhaps he meant simply being stuck thinking about the past, but I thought about it literally. I have always wanted to be able to go back and change moments of my life. In the movie Mr. Destiny, James Belushi wanted to know if he would have been more successful if he could have caught a ball in little league. I wish I knew if fighting against my bullies growing up would have made me a better man. I can't help but wonder, since I listened to my parents, was mature, and ignored them as best I could. Or if I could have a first date with a girl I liked to retry repeatedly as Bill Murray did in Groundhog Day. I simply want to know if I could have done better and been happier because of it. We have all wanted to know that we were going to trip walking across stage before hand and change it, worn a better outfit to a party, or brought the right music to impress someone. However, what if you could redo those things.

Imagine if you could step to different points in your life and change your actions, maybe your consciousness travels without your adult body back to the moment you said the wrong thing to a girl, or your adult college educated brain were able to take your social studies test to get an A. Well the question in my mind is what wouldn't you change. Wouldn't you just keep fixing things until you arrived back in your own scull to find yourself so different you were a different person? On the other hand, am I weak, am I more dissatisfied with my past decisions than other people. What if to an adult it was so weird being back in a kids brain, that you forgot which thing you had gone back to change. Trying to play and be normal, and modify one decision, and you get lost. Suddenly, you are destroying your childhood with adult thoughts, when you should be playfully innocent. It would be funny, to see yourself not enjoying your childhood from the inside because the brain doing the decision making was the one that had already been unhappy having made those mistakes before.

I don't mean that I will stop wondering what would have happened if I had told the girl that I loved at summer camp that I loved her. I will always wonder. But, I think for me at least, I would fear other outcomes more. Was it so bad that I was friends with Maya? Not really, in the end, I can't go back in time. So I guess I did end up talking about being emotionally stuck on the past, not so much literally, but can you blame me, I mean we all know time travel is impossible, Einstein said so.