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Is Time going in Reverse?

This is Girl speaking. Time. What is time? I have never been one to ask this question. I do tend to be intrigued by pretty much anything which is beyond human comprehension, but for some reason, time just never had the appeal.  The dilation of it, the relativity of it, it is all things I learned as a child, and then I went on, accepting it without actually acknowledge what it meant for me, the ways I would be limited by it. 


Well, apart from when someone would bring up time travelling, that is. To the future, to be exact. After all, only movie directors travel to the past, and they always do it wrong, fail to understand basic concepts. I would look up to the nightsky and wonder how far I would dare to go, sitting in a ship, watching familiar faces pass by and turn to stardust, knowing I could never go back and wave a farewell. No wrinkle smoothened out. No candlelight unlit. There would be no reversal. Perhaps not even an earth to return to. I could, in the span of a few seconds, be the last living human. 


A new interest in time sparked about a year ago. I was looking through my digital medias and came across a news article which had everyone’s favorite buzzword in its title: parallel universes (another thing movie directors usually get wrong)! According to… someone… NASA had just discovered an alternate world where time flows backwards, everything going in reverse, the future being the past and vice versa. Truly incredible, if only it was true, and not pure fanfiction for the sake of clicks! 


Now, I am not above theoretical discussions of what-ifs. Although I knew there was no truth to what I was reading, I found myself intrigued by people’s interpretation of what this would mean. A lot of it was simplified and selective, talks of dinosaurs being the future of Alexander the Great, but not spare him the curse of aging upwards. Oftentimes, there was this assumption that the grander things would be dragged along the backward flow, while the simpler things would fight against the stream. A lack of consistency. This might have made the matter more digestible, but only for a little while. Fallacies are a choking hazard. 


This annoyed me a great deal. If everything was truly going in reverse on an atomic level, then… well, firstly, going in reverse in relation to what? To simplify things, let’s say at this exact moment, at this point of time, we and everything around us would start reversing. You may think that this would be a special sort of hell, to feel yourself regressing to a lower intellectual level for every passing second (unless you are already old and demented or had a severe brain injury yesterday). Every life lesson unlearned, and every step taken towards a better life washed away by the waves. To be returned with your long-passed loved ones, but to also feel the immense pain the moment you lose them all over again. 


I am here to tell you to fear not! Because here is the catch: you would not feel yourself reversing at all. You would be completely unaware. Your memories, and all the emotional load they might contain, is made up from neural connections, and these would reverse too. You would be incapable of remembering “the future” you are being pulled away from. All you would know, is what came before you, your past, the one you are heading towards, meanwhile experiencing it as something you have already passed. From your point of view, you are still moving forward. You’ll live in ignorant bliss. There is no higher consciousness to your being, not a self serving as an outside-observer independent of the neural groundwork which makes up your awareness. All that matters is who you are, all that you encompass, at this exact point of time. 


And because of this, we actually have no clue what direction time is flowing. We might be going in reverse, as I write, or unwrite, this. Maybe we are in a never-ending cycle of going back and forth. All your childhood wounds, all you feel nostalgic about, and all your future aspirations, all you hope to break free from… How would it feel if you knew for certain, before drawing what you believe to be your last breath, that it is all inescapable? Lingering deja-vu… what would that even mean in such reality? 


This is just a hypothesis. I might be wrong. But at this moment, it does feel right. 


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