The Time Traveler

Did you ever wish you could go back in time and be a child again? The Time Traveler suggests there may be more to our pasts than our memories preserve.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Dispatches from Kent. Conditions remain inconclusive. Two older men sat on a bench in Kent, watching nothing in particular. They spoke the way old friends did, moving easily through their shared memories. They remembered a summer when the river froze early and no one could go swimming or fishing. They remembered a teacher who made the entire class stay after school to clean graffiti off of the gymnasium wall. They remembered believing that life would eventually explain itself. One of the men, Wyvern King, said, Remember when we were ten? The other man shook his head. Don't go there, he said. Life isn't meant to be lived backward, that's only good for parallel parking. Wyvern smiled, but the thought stayed with him. It's just I didn't know how getting old would feel. The disappointments, the regrets. If I could be ten for a day, he said, just one day. The other man hesitated and then said his son knew a company. Quiet, efficient, legal in the way that certain things managed to be. A week later, Wyvern sat in a small room with neutral walls. He signed papers that explained nothing. Wires were inserted, dials were turned, and when he opened his eyes, he was ten. The first thing that struck him was the absence of pain, no stiffness, no ache waiting for him when he stood. His body required no negotiation. If he wanted to leap, he leapt. He tried to remember the last time he had leapt as an adult and could not. He leapt again. He skipped, he hopscotched, he ran until his lungs burned, and then ran some more because the burning did not feel like a warning. It felt like permission. The wind blew his hair back from his face. He smelled flowers without needing to know their names. Everything felt immediate. Everything felt possible. This was the version of childhood adults agreed to remember. He saw old friends and felt their importance instantly, without calculation. He saw his first love and felt his heart race. Joy arrived without explanation and left just as quickly, making room for the next thing. It was overwhelming. And then without ceremony, something shifted. He saw his father. Not the father he remembered, built entirely of certainty and authority. He saw something else in his father's eyes, a tiredness, a faint disappointment that had nothing to do with him. That was the worst part. The disappointment was not personal. It was surrendered, as though his father had once believed in something, and then quietly stopped, as though life had negotiated with him and he had agreed to less. His father's losses stacked on top of each other until his will had surrendered. The boy felt it immediately. It hurt his feelings. Not sharply like scraped knees or shouted words, but deeply in a way that had no defense. He realized he had seen this expression before and simply had not understood it. Childhood had not protected him from pain. It had only denied him the language to name it. He noticed other things after that. Children who were cruel for no reason they could explain. Adults who lied casually as though practice had made it harmless. The constant alertness of being small in a large, unpredictable world. He understood then what adults forgot, not because they were dishonest, but because they had made an agreement with life itself. You forget the helplessness, you forget the confusion. You forget how exposed everything felt. In return, you're allowed to remember the sweetness. Children survived not because life was gentle with them, but because forgetting was built into them. They bounced back from things that would now flatten them as an adult. Pain arrived quickly and left just as quickly because there was nowhere else for it to stay. Wyron walked the streets of his childhood neighborhood, seeing the familiar places of his youth, the trees he climbed, the fields where he played, the house that had burned to the ground, still intact. His mind felt like it was in overdrive, taking in the sights and sounds, comparing what he had known to what he knew would happen later. By the end of the day he was exhausted. When the process reversed and his adult body returned, the aches arrived immediately. They were familiar, almost reassuring. Later he returned to the bench. His friend listened. Well, the other man asked. Wyver nodded slowly. You were right, he said. It was beautiful, but it was unbearable. Today is what matters, not yesterday and not tomorrow. They sat together as the afternoon passed. Nearby a child leapt from a low wall, landed badly, stood up, rubbed his knee, and ran on. This is your correspondent, keeping personal nostalgia in its proper place, and remembering that the most important knowledge of all is that life is now. Conditions remain inconclusive.