Dear ____,
If you’re reading this, I’m sorry. Let me explain. I know it’s been a long time. I’m sure you moved on, made a life. That’s good! But please don’t throw this in the garbage. I need you to understand.
Do you remember that summer when we were kids and you crashed my bike into a tree next to the bike path and how you felt? You had me sitting on handlebars like a fool until school started again and then you had to ride circles around me on chilly walks to school with autumn leaves raining down on us, because I was walking my bicycle-free ass the mile and a half there. Do you remember? So, yeah, we all make mistakes. I’m sorry.
I see now what went wrong. It was a calculation error. For all our engineering prowess, there always seemed to be some fatal error in our plan, which you would normally catch and then look at me the way you did like “c’mon.” But not this time. You weren’t there to catch it, because I ran ahead, stupidly, intoxicated by exuberance and fear. I thought I could hasten the moment when we were free. But I was wrong and it’s over. It’s too late. I can tell you what happened. Maybe it will help you understand.
That morning you made raspberry muffins with the ones we picked from our backyard. They were the best muffins in the world. The summer sun baked the back deck and the white hot light shining in the kitchen windows would leave us squinting at each other over coffee.
The previous day you had finally arrived at the transversal quotient after weeks of work, so we sat together smiling, starting to sweat from the heat and the black coffee and the humming anticipation. We mmm’d and aahhh’d over the raspberry muffins but quickly got distracted again. We didn’t say much. We didn’t have to. We could see the end now.
You called Mike after breakfast and let him know, and I could hear him yell “Fuck yes!” from across the room, even though you weren’t on speaker phone. God, I miss Mike. His scraggly beard and the perpetual twinkle in his eye. We all had the same vision then. I guess it was a fantasy, but it was real to us. We believed it, believed in it.
I cleaned up after breakfast while you headed to the garage to get to work. I didn’t tell you this later, but after you had left and I was finished with the dishes, I stood on the deck in the sun and just listened to the sounds of you working. Birdsong syncopated the rushing sound of your soldering iron and the dead clang of metal against metal, and the heat slow simmered the garage rooftop. I thought it may be one of the last times I would hear that. I greedily swallowed deep breaths of the air, savoring it. That’s how close it felt, like we were going to cross a threshold and when we looked back it would be an impenetrable wall. No going back. But why would we? It was what we had always wanted.
Eventually, I joined you in the garage and when I walked in you were bent over the control panel with a soldering iron, wearing that blue tank top you loved and shorts. Sweat glued the hair to your forehead and your ponytail hung low on your back, because you hadn’t gotten a haircut in a long time. You kept complaining about how your neck felt hot and you needed to cut it. “I’m about to buzz it,” you said once. “That’s cool now, right? Women with short hair?” How would you know? How would I know, for that matter?
I watched you for a moment. I saw your breasts pressed against the metal. Your legs straddled the titanium shell while you put the finishing touches on your work. Yeah, I was a little turned on, but it was mostly admiration of you that I felt. How did I get so lucky? You looked up and pulled off your mask when you saw me. You smiled and went back to work without a word.
I walked over to the whiteboard on the far side of the garage where your calculations were carefully scripted in your small, kempt handwriting. I scanned them again just to confirm you really had done it. You were a genius. You are a genius. Let me say this now before anything else is said: I got too much credit for your genius. You were the real deal. Whatever else happened, whatever everyone else thought or thinks, I want you to know that I know you were the real genius.
Time settles the dust. Things become clearer. I know you’re laughing as you read that, but I mean it. Mike may have been our best bud, but time was our closest companion. Time hung between us like an invisible talisman that we must attend to lest it fall and break. But in its expansive presence, we couldn’t see beyond it.
Only now do I see that our love for time was flawed, fatally so. I didn’t realize it until long after the accident. I didn’t see that building a time machine was a way of fearing time as much as loving it. We would tell ourselves and each other that we loved it, that it was our life’s work. We talked about it constantly, often into the early morning hours sipping black tea. We were fiends for it, truly. We were addicted. We spent hours, days, weeks, months, years calculating it. We planned and anticipated what it would mean to have that time, to control it. We rushed headlong into the question of time, and we macheted our way through the thicket of tangled paradoxes. We lost many friends along the way. Only when the machine was almost finished did time seem to slow down, the aperture of awareness opened.
Mike was still with us, but no one else. He was a devotee as well. Only the truly faithful could stand the gravitational pull of our orbit. When the machine was finished, it was like the Earth had paused its celestial spinning. We should have seen it then, the contradiction at the heart of us, the fear, for it is always fear that cracks open the human world and lays it before us to survey the wreckage. But we didn’t see it, only the light that guided us, like some phantasmal north star that radiated a siren song that only we could hear.