Up and Down

Some days are better than others. Some days anything is possible; not just seems possible but actually happens inside your head - great swathes of what-might-be, broken up like some mad collage of the future. And then everything flips, a giant proof of catastrophe theory made real, bringing down these psychotic castles with a breath of logic, until you want to just lie in the rubble with the covers over your head and inhale your own breath, waiting for it to make you sleepy and forget the disasters of the real world.

Maybe I wish for something to wipe the memory of the trials that bring me to this but I have been through this before; no reminiscences are worth the trouble for no time moves backwards. My daughter insisted last night that building a time machine is possible and I told her that I could travel through time but she did not believe me until I said that we all travel through time in one direction and at the same speed. I thought about explaining the paradoxes of time travel and how some people believed that it was mathematically possible to build a time machine but thought it might stop her sleeping. Not that much does. Although she remembers so much, nothing results in any regrets of embarrassment; I am responsible for taking on those burdens so she can just travel forwards without worrying about mistakes. I remember being like that, how my dad did all the worrying about the world for me so that the three-day week, the possibility of nuclear destruction, all the bad stuff around us was filtered out, leaving us with sunny afternoons and headlong rushes down the hills to the undesigned playgrounds with beautiful friends and grammar to match.