Letter Number Four

Today, while Johnny-mopping the toilets in the Student Union –plunge swirl scritcha scritcha—I finally came to articulate a thing that had bothered me since the first letter, but I’d been afraid to admit to myself:  I wouldn’t build a time-travelling pair of underwear to confront my father. 

There it was.  I mean, I guess it’s true that, if I had the capability already, I’d go back and do it, sure.  But I wasn’t thinking about time-travel before that first letter arrived, and I certainly wasn’t obsessed about my dad.  He and I’ve been talking regularly for four or five years now, I feel pretty good about him, quite frankly.  And even now, knowing that I’m capable of inventing time-travel, I don’t feel particularly driven by the idea of seeing my 24 year-old dad.

So there must have been an Original Me who was driven, right?  Who arrived at this time in his life and decided he had to invent time travel.

And then I had a second realization, one that dropped my jaw and stopped my Johnny-mop mid-scritcha: It’s the WAY the letters are written!  Sure, future me acknowledges the existence of the letters within the letters, but not enough.  He doesn’t show their true influence.  For example: I credit having read the letter with stopping me from smoking a cigarette after my dad runs off in front of the hospital, and then with reminding me to go upstairs and hold my infant self.  BUT!  In the second letter, I pretend that I had to tail Mom and M.B. for six days, when in reality all I had to do was check the date and time in the text, adjust the dials and BAM!  I’m there.  In the third letter, waiting around the corner for 3 hours?  Come on!  I’ll have spent 22 years with these letters, I’ll know every moment of them.

So.  They’re half-written as though I’m experiencing them for the first time, and half the future me who lives with the letters for a third of his life.  Which told me two things: there definitely was an Original Me who created time-travel, experienced all of it for the first time, wrote about his trips, then felt compelled to communicate with his past self for some reason.  And that’s when the paradox begins, this closed loop of the letters’ influence.  The second thing it told me was that my future self has been lying to me.  I clearly have the ability and willingness to rewrite portions of the letters, but I’m preserving the voice of that Original Me for some reason.  I whispered aloud to myself, my toilet brush still frozen between scritchas: “Why?”

I heard a –POP!—from the sink area just outside the stall I was in, then the squeak of a shoe-sole on the tile, but I was slow to react.  By the time I even thought about poking my head out to peek, the second –POP!—happened, and I stepped out into an empty restroom.  Empty except for a blue envelope leaned against the wall-length mirror above the line of sinks. 

I walked over and picked up Letter Number Four:

After I fell out of the car, I had this vision of myself bouncing like a fish on the line over the water, only the water was made of little stones and the fish was made of me.  It was immediately comic to me, in the way that Daffy Duck being shot in the face by Elmer Fudd and only having to twist his beak back around as a consequence was funny.  And like cartoon logic bends the laws of physics to its own ends, I took my ability to hold onto that door handle as proof that I could, on occasion at least, achieve the impossible.  Like read minds or fly.  Or convince a girl to let me see her naked.  Or hit a baseball. 

I did eventually see a naked girl.  And I haven’t let go of the rest.  I’ve got a good grip.

Future me, I don’t exactly get what you’re talking about at the end of this letter yet.  But I’m pretty sure I can handle it.  So bring it on, dude.  Drop some bombs.