In a Moment

Some believe that time is like a one-way sidewalk. We walk down it and time acts on us, changing us, aging us, until we accumulate everything time has to give us. If we traveled back, there would be no past selves or past anything, just the empty time frame that we’d walked through. Others believe that time is a motion picture and that we, as time-bound beings, are captured as images on its film. If we traveled back, it would simply be like rewinding the tape to a certain spot and recording again.

What do you believe?

I remember you asked me that one day. On one of the days I met you in the park before you left for Harvard. I was sitting on the fountain with my sketchbook and you were lying in the grass, your brushes and colored pencils and loose paper scattered around you like an artist’s autumn.

“What do you think it would be like to sit in a black hole?” you ask as you set aside your thirteenth masterpiece that day.

I reach out to spiral my fingers over the drying ink, tracing the paths of Dopplered star-streaks and bleeding planets as they’re stretched toward a formless black splotch in the center of the page. As my finger pauses in the heart of that black splotch, I let myself imagine what it would be like to sit right there, to watch millenniums streak by and see the hugest of stars get drained into a lightless, timeless hole.

“It’d be like sitting in a time machine,” I end up saying.

You look up as the breeze tugs and swirls the early turning leaves, rustling like your blank sheet of paper and yellow like the marker poised in your hand.

“Do you believe in time travel?” you ask.

“Hypothetically,” I say, sounding like some dusty sterile textbook. “One second in a black hole would be equal to thousands of hours on earth. Traveling into the future is perfectly possible in theory, but there’s no way to travel back.”

You’re still looking at me, an eyebrow raised, the marker still stuck on pause.

“So you believe in relativity,” you say. “But what do you believe about time travel?”

That is when you ask me.

Spell out the laws of the fourth-dimension and blueprint its boundaries. As if I could capture an hour and observe it in a glass bottle.

It’s a strange question—a scientifically naïve and preposterous question. But the way you smile—as if you know some deep dark secret about space-time that I couldn’t possibly know—makes me pause. It makes me want to gaze long and hard into the blackness of your pupils and find out what you’re hiding from light and time itself, even though I know I’ll be endlessly frustrated. So instead, I let my eyes rove over the dried ink on the wrinkled paper, settling for what I can see, even if it’s only a blurry snapshot.

“I think it’s both,” I remember finally saying. “I think time is like a drop of paint trickling down a wall. It only goes one way, but if we could somehow break away from the drop and travel against gravity, we would encounter a form of the drop we were once a part of, while making a new path all the while.”

“So you think that we can travel back without getting younger,” you say.

“Yes,” I reply.

“And thus, you believe that we can never regain time by traveling back,” you say.

“Yes,” I say again, still sure of my claim.

You nod slowly and select a clean sheet of paper and three crayons—Vivid Tangerine, Wild Watermelon, and Cosmic Cobalt—my words disappearing into your mind to add to who knows what mass of thoughts.

But meanwhile, there’s only one thought in my mind, one word that sums and strikes me for the fourteenth time that day: Beautiful.

The way you’re sprawled on the grass, busily scribbling in furious inspiration like a gangly eight-year-old makes me smile. The way that you coax the colors and forms so effortlessly onto pages and pages seems like magic.

But it’s that mind, the beautiful mind creating it all, that has me captivated.

What else is there inside that mind? What other fascinating things besides the neon streaks of quantum physics and the muted strokes of spending afternoons in the park are residing there? I yearn to know, though I fear that the summer I’ve spent with you is not enough to afford me the answers.

“What are you drawing?” you ask me. You put aside your paintings of a humming bird in motion and the sketch of the Northern Lights over the sea. You get up, leaving a silhouette of two legs and half a body matted in the grass, and sit on the stone beside me, your eyes wandering over my sketch.

“It’s a flipbook,” I say. I close my sketchbook and press my thumb to the edge, letting the pages flip in rapid succession and for a couple seconds, giving motion to a figure walking to a fountain and sitting on its edge.

“Fourth-dimensional art,” you say with a grin. “That’s…amazing.” You peer at the sketch again. “Looks like someone I know.”

I shrug and smile to my sketchbook, but you don’t get up and return to your nest of pictures and pencils strewn in the grass. You sit there, gazing out over the unmowed grass and the trees just starting to turn colors as if there are a thousand other places in space-time that you could be, but smiling as if the one place you want to be in this moment is here, on the edge of the fountain too.

“What about people?” I ask you. “Do you think individuals are like particles in a laser beam, oscillating together as they travel in a never-ending line to infinity? Or are people more like atoms in free space, randomly colliding and ricocheting through time at a million miles per hour?”

“I think…” You don’t finish, but your eyes light up, a combustive nova of fragments and thoughts driving you to pluck your watercolor pots from the grass and swish your paintbrush in the fountain before the newly-formed idea dissolves.

The first drop is azure. The second is sea green. The third, butter yellow. After the fourth, I stop counting, and simply watch the soft-hued drops quivering on the paper, each one a different color from the last. But the last drop is royal blue. And the very last, a deep magenta.

“Watch,” you tell me.

You tilt the paper and the droplets begin to run, making a pastel rainbow of timeline trickles down the page. I watch as you arch and curve the edges of the paper, making some of the drops run together and then separate, the new drops now bearing hues from the other drops they had crossed paths with.

“Every drop is pulled down at an acceleration of nine-point-eight meters per second squared,” you say, “but each drop has its own path through space.”

And then you flick the back of the paper, sending a spray of tiny little droplet fragments back over your paper continuum.

“What are those?” I ask you.

“Memories,” you say. “Because right now, that’s the only form of time travel we have.”

I take my eyes off the droplets to meet your eyes, the summer sun catching little needles of light in your irises as you smile back at me and hold out the still damp paper. For a split second, the paper is caught between our grasps and its drops are ignored, and I wish desperately that I could stretch this moment, that I could sit with you in the heart of a black hole, sit in front of the kaleidoscope of your mind long enough for every facet to be discovered, while the rest of the universe rushes by.

But the drops keep on running down the page, unceasingly, until they bleed into the paper, now a finished work of the fourth dimension.

I’m looking at the paper again, now dry for two months, my eyes tracing the paths of a royal blue drop and a magenta drop. For one moment at the center of the page, their paths are indistinguishable, but then time and space bend again and their paths become separate.

I put down my pencil and stop it from rolling off the edge of the fountain into the water. I press my thumb to the dog-eared edge of the sketchbook and watch, like so many times before, as a penciled figure sits on the edge of a fountain and another figure comes along to sit beside them. I stop flipping.

For a moment, the two figures are still. And for a moment, everything—the water flowing and splashing behind them, the smiles on their faces, the unknown possibilities of the future on the next page—is frozen, snapshotted.

I rub my fingernail over six magenta flecks on the page, not getting any younger, not regaining any time, and then keep flipping. The two individuals, once sitting together on the fountain, get up and part ways, separated with each flip of space and time.

My pencil hovers over the next blank page. What will this figure on the fountain do next?

I pick up your picture and dip my finger into the ripples of the fountain. As I touch my finger to the paper, the drop mixes with the pigment and begins to run, picking up where the last drop left off until it drips off the edge of the paper. I watch as it falls onto my sketchbook at nine-point-eight meters per second squared and begins trickling down the page, leaving a violet trail in its wake.