GoKawiilHi. My name is Jamie and I’m a chronic backtracker. I’m fourteen months, one week, and three days present. I haven’t stopped by in a while. I’ve been vacationing — travelling spatially. But the real reason I haven’t been coming to these meetings is that I thought I had this thing licked.
I’m back tonight because I lost a stack of postcards.
I’d carefully selected them in every city I visited, picking cheesy ones for my hip friends and pretty ones for the boring squares. I’d written out exactly what I wanted to say on each one, and they were ready to send off.
But I’m cheap; I held onto them until I was back in the States so I could post them at domestic rates. And then I was jet-lagged and loopy during a long layover at La Guardia, and I left all those freshly stamped postcards in a Delta lounge. Just left them in a neat stack next to a cup of the worst latte I’ve ever had.
We were airborne before I realized my stupid mistake, and I was shocked at how hard I took it. Those postcards had seemed like a silly lark, but sitting on that plane, I felt a ferocious, overpowering urge to rewind for the first time in nearly a year.
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I realized that sending those postcards was going to be my way of telling everyone — all the people that mattered to me — that they didn’t have to worry any more. Because I am living in a moment again. Because I’m back on track and fully fixed in the now again. Because I’m fixed now.
I spent that entire five-and-a-half-hour flight on a mental hamster wheel. I wanted so badly to rewind to that Delta lounge and pick up those postcards. Just this once, I told myself. Just one little jaunt. Five and a half hours! Spatial travel is so agonizingly slow.
Then I started rationalizing that as long as I was going back to then anyway, I might as well get a seltzer instead of that godawful latte. Seriously, this was six days ago and I’m still tasting it.
All the bad old thought patterns came back. I had deleted the number of my ‘chemist’, but of course, of course, it’s still tattooed onto my brain. The nine digits, but also the sound they made when I tapped them out, and tapped them out again a couple of minutes later if he didn’t pick up. And then if I still had a few micrograms left at the bottom of the ampoule, I’d back up a quarter of an hour to undo all of my pestering. Couldn’t risk annoying my hook-up.
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