Time travelling through my Inbox

Time travel has never really appealed to me but gauging by its popularity as a theme in novelistic and cinematic endeavours, the possibility fuels the fevered hopes and dreams of many.

If it was possible and I had to choose between visiting the past or visiting the future, I would choose the past. I couldn’t bear a future that was worse than my today—it would crush one’s will to live which is why I think most rational people would choose to visit the past—fewer unknowns.  

There are a few moments or events I would like to witness in history; the Liberation of Paris, the coronation of Charlemagne, the carving of the Ram Khamhaeng inscription and the Rosetta stone. More important than events, it’s people I’d choose to visit. After years in her company, I’d make my first trip into the past to my grandmother’s flower garden on a sunny day. She’d be in a sun hat with gardening gloves on, swishing the cats away from the freshly dug earth.

I would think deeply about finding the precise moment in time when a cell failed to copy correctly or followed the wrong instructions while I was in utero resulting in the birth defect that has played such an important role in my day to day life. Would I change that moment if it were possible? Thinking hard on the situation—I don’t know if I would. Adversity has made me the person I am, and I think I am doing pretty good as a human. But the toll is sometimes a heavy one. Better to ask this question when I am writhing in pain waiting for the drugs to kick in —I think I’d give a different answer.

Time travel, it’s a tricky idea when you look at as H.G. Wells envisioned it in the novel The Time Machine, but we humans already have the means to travel through time, at least in one direction--the past.

Books, film, audio recordings and archaeology all afford us glimpses of the past. I love nothing more than to find documentary footage of events from before I was born. Last year I found original footage of building the Aswan Dam in Egypt from the 1960s and used it in a presentation. It was amazing to see the technology and manpower used to build that mega project more than 50 years ago.

This topic of time travel came to mind last week when my Hotmail threatened to freeze due to dwindling storage space. I rarely clean out my Inbox; it serves as an archive of my life. But the threat of losing access to any incoming mail made me come to the realization that I had to reduce some of my files.

Logic dictated that removing the oldest messages would be the best way to start my virtual housecleaning. My oldest messages were from 2006. There must have been a purge of email before this recent warning as I have been using this Hotmail account since 1998.

But 2006 is still a fair jaunt back in time. I was living in Bangkok, had one child and was working as a freelance journalist. I had mail from various clients: An online store I wrote copy for including elaborate stories about pearls, teak and candles to sell products. A magazine that hired me as copy editor for entire issues; name on the masthead and the whole shebang. The International School for which I wrote all the PR and the prospectus. Various other forms of piece work for magazines around the city—all reminding me of how busy I was and how successfully I was breaking into a career in writing on so many fronts.

Then there was an email from the woman with whom my ex was cheating on me, asking me where he was because she had not heard from him in a while and she was worried. Needless to say, I didn’t hesitate to hit delete on that one.

There were other emails I was more reluctant to delete from friends and former students who I am no longer in touch with, interview notes—I hate to purge those, and some back and forth from members of the writing group I was a member of for several years. Those were perhaps the hardest ones to think about deleting. The group, I am guessing, is done and dusted, our many members scattered to the four corners of the earth. Fortunately, I am still in touch with many of the members but there are others who have disappeared from my life like the artist who introduced me to Frida Kahlo, the lady who had some great memories to share about growing up in Thailand in the 1950s, and a budding American playwright who watched her property get swamped by Hurricane Katrina from half a world away. I miss them all.

In the end, I couldn’t let go – couldn’t cut the timeline and erase that part of my life. I emptied my work folder instead. There’s always more work, but those friends and those emails from my last year in Thailand are a snapshot of the life I left behind. Keeping them in my inbox means I can time travel back to those days—minus the cheating ex—anytime I want. I don’t need a time machine, just a computer- and those are pretty easy to come by these days.