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| Time Door by James Rosenquist |
The cardinal law of time travel is this: when visiting the past, you must never, never do anything in the past that will change the present, and I hereby confess that I’m guilty of this crime, that, truthfully, I’ve broken this law more times than I can count, although in my defense I must say that almost all of my time traveling has been involuntary
(I’m walking down the street, minding my own business, when the scent of certain brand of laundry detergent comes wafting out of the open door of a laundromat, which reminds me of an old lover who used that product to wash her clothes and linens, and I’m suddenly yanked right off the sidewalk and thrown back into her bed, whether I like it or not, and she is sweeter than I originally thought)
and it sometimes even happens in my sleep
(I dream that I am searching the closets in the house where I grew up, and there are rooms I never knew about before, and closets behind closets behind closets, all full of clothes that I never wore and shoes that I do not remember and toys that I never played with)
but my most serious infraction was intentional, committed when I started digging into my family history after I had a DNA test and I discovered that my maternal grandmother was Jewish and that my German family hid this from the Nazis and kept it secret all these years
(which sent me helplessly spinning back to the age of two when my earliest memories of my family began, and with the new information I had obtained, my mother’s oppressive strictness transformed into concerned over-protectiveness and my father’s coldness mutated into determined strength and emotional restraint)
and when I returned to the present, I realized that I had seriously fucked with the timeline because that's another law of time travel: when you travel into the past, the present that you return to will have inevitably been altered
(I don't quite know who I am anymore—am I Jewish?)
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