When I think of time, I think of it as malleable and fragile as the mind that holds it. Since I was little I’ve had a fear and fascination with schizophrenia, the fear that it could take someone unsuspecting and unwilling at any time and disintegrate their ability to distinguish reality, and a curiosity about how differently we’re all experiencing time and reality. Who’s reality is the ‘truest’ reality, who’s time is ‘real time’. There’s waking life, dream life, fantasy life, psychotic life, memories and they’re all occurring in contradictory time. For all of these to exist at once happening on different timelines within different people regardless of conventional time, does that not challenge time’s linearity? Could that be a form of time travel we all have available to us? How thin is the veil between exploration and loss of sanity?

Last year I spent a lot of time researching limerence, I think even if it’s a bit maladaptive it’s a form of time travel rooted in an intense longing for an altered present. Often states of limerence involve daydreaming so intensely about the “limerent object” that it can disrupt a person's daily life, the false reality becomes so pervasive it can affect actuality. Every hour put into the fantasy takes you further from reality, eventually the limerent object (even if based on a real person) transmutes beyond recognition and becomes something entirely new.

I thought about the year I turned thirteen when my step Dad got me Rock Band for Christmas. I’d always have this chunk of time alone from 2pm-6pm or so while my parents were away at work, these two girls that lived in the neighborhood would come by and we made two bands in the game. The first was an all girl group based on idealized versions of ourselves that were cooler, hotter, and could do things we couldn’t in real life. The second was a group of guys based on our ideal boyfriends (none of us had ever been kissed at this point). We would alternate between the two groups, playing fake concerts then going for long walks where we’d daydream about made up scenarios between the perfect Us and the perfect Them. This escalated into a Google doc that we’d pass between each other and take turns writing out chapters and chapters of this fake reality between three real girls and three fictional boys. Eventually it began to alienate our real life friends that weren’t a part of it and as they withdrew we drew further into our friendship, further into the document, further into this idyllic teenage world that existed outside of time but had a very real affect on our physical lives.

We can tether and untether ourselves from one reality to another in an effort to make sense of the world around and within ourselves. I think in this way time travel exists and is available to everyone.