A term used for astronomy is appropriate when we consider the twists and turns of life. When we look at the pinpoint of light from a star, we know that the light could have taken a million years or more to get here, so we are really looking at the star as it was eons ago. The star we see may have blown up and hasn’t existed in a million years. By now, it certainly isn’t in the same position in the sky. If we saw the stars for what they are today, familiar constellations would be unrecognizable and some of their components might be gone completely, We tell ourselves that the familiar patterns we see in the sky are happening today even though we know it is not.
So too, do we look at history—our own history—through the lens of lookback time. We see a moment in time that might have happened decades ago, and we act as if time hasn’t changed and distorted that memory at all. We see it as the moment is still happening. And importantly, see these moments as if the rapacious ravages of time haven’t change everything.
What if I had said yes that day, and not said no? What if had turned left and not right? What if she hadn’t given me that look in that moment? Our minds alight on the questions, pause, and race on ahead.
But it is lookback time. So much has changed. The moment isn’t truly frozen because when we use lookback time, we see things not as they are, but as they once were.
So it is with lookback time that recall a moment that happened when I was in my high school math class. It had been less than six months since I had been declared more-or-normal and released from the nutbox. I didn’t really get it yet, but it turns out if you have been abused, people swoop in to fix you, not the abuser. But it was a new day. A couple women came into class, a girl even, we were just teens. I thought it looked like they were high on something because that was my orientation, but that wasn’t it, they were just a couple students who were late to class.
Meeting people was not my strong suit. It wasn’t then and it isn’t now, but for some reason I was drawn to one of those women. We spent a lot of time in the ensuing weeks and months arguing and bickering, I guess that could be called puppy love. She was the daughter of an alcoholic who had made his family’s lives miserable. I had the abuse thing, and in each other’s eyes, there was a connection that the wounded often have. For some reason, I thought my destiny and hers were intertwined. But there was something else, something more than that, I have to twist the dials of lookback time to bring it into focus.
I saw her as wounded yes, but there was an innocence about that woman. I believed back then in her goodness, her wholesomeness. I believed she was the sweet face at the end of my road, an ideal to strive for, In life, we continued to weave back and forth, but I always thought our lives would eventually fuse together. What I couldn’t see, what I could only see with lookback time was that we were already changing, spinning into other orbits.
So there will be more stories and times that my anomalous heart would fill and burst over her—some of those I will share in notes yet to come. But suffice it to say, I chased her while we both pursued other relationships, united briefly over her pregnancy and subsequent abortion. Through her marriages, my marriage, her divorce, the death of my wife. It was an endless thing, trying to recapture that scant moment in a classroom, many years ago. I would never actually find my sweet face at the end of the road—in her or anyone—but with lookback time I came to realize what astronomers know and accept every day: That faint star from my past blew up many years ago.