Chapter Text
Prologue: History
To explain how weight pulls things like light, we have to play around with time again. The Space Doctor showed that if time itself goes slower near heavy things, then the side of the light near the heavy thing won’t go as far every second. This lets the light turn toward the heavy thing. The doctor’s idea was that weight slows down time, and it explained how light could bend. But to figure out how much light bends, we need to look at the other part of the doctor’s big idea. To talk about that part, let’s forget about light, and, instead, visit another world...
Randall Munroe, The Space Doctor’s Big Idea
* * *
I've gotta tell you my tale,
Of how I loved and how I failed.
The Verve, History
It’s an important day today.
Not earth-shakingly important, I’ll grant you. Not even what you might call of local importance. Yeah, it’s a festival, but we’ve got plenty of them in the calendar, and to be honest I’m pretty much inured to most of them anyway, like the cantankerous old sod I am. What makes this one important is that I’ve decided it’s important to me, because it’s the day I’ve chosen to remember.
Once upon a time...
It’s strange for me, looking back at memories in that way, like it’s all a nice clear linear sequence from start to finish. It’s not how my brain works. I tend more towards the random-attic-of-junk memory model, where I have a whole heap of different half-remembered sights and sounds and conversations and experiences and what-not, but connecting them all together into a neat pattern is more than I can manage, or be arsed to try. I can remember them all just fine, but finding that thread that links them all together into my own little story – nah, not so much.
But I do have a good memory, and although the stuff I remember on this day did happen a long time ago, once upon a time in fact, I’ve got no difficulty in bringing those memories out to play, none whatsoever. It’s just that I’ve spent the last however many years consciously choosing not to do that, because life goes on, and, when all's said and done, what’s the fucking point of wasting your life moping around about shit you can’t do anything about any more, eh?
Instead, like the abstemious, moderate soul that I am, I limit myself to one good mope a year. Very reserved, no? It's just that today’s Mope Day.
So, anyway...
Once upon a time..
It doesn’t seem like that when I do indulge myself with a reminisce. I’m not hazy about what happened at all, not even the bits I’d happily be hazy about, and all the effort I’ve put in over the years to airbrush that crap out is pointless when my brain’s decided that, fuck it, you’re going to have a good ol’ wallow now, my girl. I get every last bloody moment in all its technicolour, Dolby surround, smell-o-vision glory.
But the fact that I've got such vivid memories still, now, such a long time later, does make me think about what we mean when we talk about time, and past, and present, and future, and stuff like that.
I’ve seen theories about reality, about existence, that reckon that in infinite universes of infinite size, if you travel fast enough, everything that’s ever been is happening all at the same time, kind of. Simultaneity, I think it’s called, and I think it’s based on Einstein-y ideas about how it’s space-time that warps around mass and time moves at different speeds and all that sort of bollocks. Amazing thought, ain’t it?
Now, to tell you the truth, I never really got my head around A Brief History Of Time, not past the first page or two, but I think that was the gist of some of it at least. It sounds a bit like that Pink Floyd song to me – all that has been, and all that is now, and all that’s to come, and everything under the Sun. All out there in the unimaginable vastness and weirdness of existence, and it’s just our feeble little monkey brains that stop us understanding it.
I'm guessing I'm a fair bit older than most of you lot, but let me tell you, when you get to a certain point in your life, the idea that, actually, your beautiful teenage self is still out there, alive and well, living it up, and will keep on living it up for ever, is pretty fucking appealing, I must admit.
I’ve got a fairly tight lid on my memories, and my emotions, too. Every other day of the year, I’m just me, Little Miss Level Head, living my best life in the here and now, not worrying about a load of shit I got up to decades ago, not caring about the amazing things I did, not giving a toss about everything I’d gained, and everything I’d lost, since then. Proper Zen fucking master, me, at one with the universe. But, because I am human, whatever some twats might have suggested to the contrary, I still do allow myself one single day off each year, where I let my guard down and let all them memories, good, bad and ugly as fuck, come tumbling out.
Well, guess what? Lucky old me, today’s that day.
And because today’s that day, I know with absolute certainty that one of the many traditional, pointless, tedious fucking thought experiments that I’ll put myself through today as part of my annual shitty-past-events-deep-dive will be the notion that none of this is gone, that it’s all still out there really, if I can just run and run and run and keep on going faster and faster until reality bends around me for a change, not me having to bend for every other fucker, and what has been slows, and rewinds, and morphs into what is now, and what is to come.
If so, maybe, somewhere and somewhen out there, me and my mates are still the gorgeous, crazy, amazing girls we always were, still having stupid, bonkers, fun adventures and being young and invincible, and cool as fuck, and twice as beautiful.
Because, once upon a time, that’s who I was.
I’ll tell you all about it. Bring snacks, though, it's a hell of a story.
Now, are you sitting comfortably?
Good.
Then I'll begin.
Once Upon A Time...