You leave as soon as I show up. Of course, it looks like we leave at the same time to anyone other than me.
You hand your notebook across the table to me and I open it to the last page, reminding myself for the millionth time to contact you to arrange this meeting. I don’t know what will happen if I don’t do that. It might be worth finding out, but then, how would I tell anyone about it? Would I even remember? Would I exist?
I put pen to paper and began tracing the words. Writing out a lifetime of my own research, carefully committed to memory. It has to be in my head. My brain is the only recording device that doesn’t erase itself as I use it.
It has taken me years to learn everything I need to tell you. It will, not coincidentally, take you just as long to use that knowledge. We are meeting at one point in a circular track, at the other end from the point where we both started in opposite directions.
I remember when we first met. Meeting people is always strange for me. They will be talking to me before I notice them, and then I will get their attention, and then they will forget I exist. I can watch their expression change from recognition, to acknowledgement, to blankness. Except you. The first time I met you, you knew exactly who I was, and you didn’t seem to forget me.
I run the pen backwards through my own words, drawing the pigment out of the paper, gathering the molecules from where they have dispersed to stain the page, even pulling water from out of the air to keep the ink wet before it is packed neatly back into the pen. I am an entropy-eating machine.
What I am writing, or un-writing from my perspective, is the groundwork that will create me. Time does not exist. Or at least, all of time exists all at once, which is kind of the same thing. Time is simply one dimension in which you can travel through the universe. Its only cardinal directions are toward and away from zero entropy. You take it for granted that “away” is the forward direction, the only direction, but that is only because it is convenient for you. Only because, back when life first formed, the first cells happened to use increasing entropy as their engine. If it had’ve gone the other way, maybe I’d be the one watching everything decay.
Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this. Maybe it’s better if I don’t exist. My life has not been particularly pleasant when I can’t interact with anyone. You were my only friend. Because you, unlike everyone else I’ve ever attempted to talk to, recognised me as a friend before we met.
Talking was hard. We’d read notes from each other that we’d have to pass back and watch the other un-write. We’d have to guess what the other had been saying in order to respond. Our conversations moved in strange, fluctuating circles.
You told me everything about yourself, and then, as I opened up more and more to you, you started to draw away, to tell me less about your days. And then one day you didn’t give me one of my notes back. I had to snatch it back from the desk in front of you. You turned to me, and I saw the recognition, the acknowledgement, and then – nothing. I watched you forget me. That’s when I knew it was time. I would have to tell you everything, and then I would never see you again.
I don’t even know if the breakthrough that led to me will lead to anything good. The moment of my birth is a wall beyond which I cannot see. You have the benefit of billions of others, all moving forward like you, to help you to piece together everything that happened before you existed.
I travel backwards through time on my own.
Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this. Maybe I should let you have a normal life, and prevent my lonely existence before it happens. But you were all I had.
I suck the last bit of ink out of the first page and leave, taking the book with me, walking backwards, not wanting to seem crazy to you just as you see me for the first time. I pause at the door, to take my last look. I hope you love me the first time you see me as much as I loved you. I hope you believe me. If you don’t believe me, then the last twenty years of my life, and the next twenty of yours, will not happen.
About the author:
C Lenz is a writer, scientist, and badass from Hamilton, Ontario. She has been previously published in AE: the Canadian Science Fiction Review, and Metaphorosis, and she recently was an honorable mention in the 2023 Hamilton GritLIT Short Story Contest. For her day job, she works with unsettling amounts of human blood.
Find C:
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