Correspondence with My Future Self

Some of you may be wondering if I have the slightest idea what I'm talking about with all this time business.  You may be wondering, who died and made him the king of time travel?  Where is his proof?  Where is his time traveling sports car?  Where are all his degrees and important science awards and...stuff?  Why is he so impossibly good looking?  Okay, maybe not that last one.  I figured I'd try to slip that one in there.  But let me ask you this: How many of you have tried to actually test the possibility of time travel?  Well, I have.

As I've said on more than one occasion, I was very interested in time travel when I was a kid.  When I was twelve, I began to wonder if this obsession of mine would ever yield any results.  I wondered if I would ever find myself traveling in time some day.  What can I say?  I was a weird kid.  Anyway, it occurred to me that there might be a way of finding this out without learning the virtue of patience.  I decided that I would try to write myself a letter, my future self.  I would give my future self instructions to meet at an exact time and place.  I'm not sure why I thought my future self would be at the beck and call of a twelve year old kid, but I figured that he was probably a pretty cool guy.  So I wrote myself a short note and included the time and date: September 6, 1988 at 6:35pm (see kid, I remember) and the location where I'd be.  Then I put a note on the envelope specifying that it wasn't to be opened until 2010.  2010 sounded like it was way, way in the future.  Certainly there would be time travel by then.  So I took this letter down to the mailbox, dropped it in and waited...and waited.  Nothing.  Well, I wasn't giving up.  I wrote another letter.  This time I said to meet at 7:05pm and left a note on the envelope saying not to open it until 2015.  I dropped it in and...again, nothing.

I learned something about my future that day.  I didn't learn who I was going to marry.  I didn't learn if I was ever going to be rich.  I didn't learn if I where I was going to live.  Technically, I didn't even learn whether I was actually ever going to be able to travel in time.  I learned one, simple thing.  I learned that I was never, ever, under any circumstances, going to travel back in time to meet that twelve year old boy standing by that mailbox.  If it was going to happen, it would have happened.  In this case, I was the silver jumpsuit guy, and I never showed up.  I know; pretty rude.  But suppose it was possible now, and I decided to go back there.  Well, then why don't I remember it?  If I did go back there, and the whole "multiverse" thing was true, I guess I would be meeting a me from a parallel universe then.  I don't want to meet some me that isn't me, some Asimovian construct that goes through the robotic motions of being me.  Why should he get to have all the fun?  What a weirdo.  But this isn't what you really want to know, right?  You want to know where the hell I sent those letters.

Well, I was living in Ohio then.  My parents had divorced years ago, and my father had ended up moving out to Arizona a few years later.  So I sent the letters to his address, but with my name on them.  I figured that he would stick them in a drawer and save them for me for the next twenty years or so.  Well, I was never much of a letter writer, so he was quite surprised to get something in the mail from me.  He completely ignored the notes on the envelopes and opened them.  I probably could have brought him up on federal charges for opening my mail, even if it was in his mailbox.  He got a big kick out of the whole thing.  He probably either thought it was very clever or that his son was slightly autistic.  Either way, he told this story to everyone in my family way, way more times than I cared to hear it.  It's only because I have twenty three years on that kid now, that I can even rationalize my own embarrassment  enough to talk about it here.

The future is a funny thing.  You never know how it's going to turn out.  My dad died in 2008.  How could either of us have known that I was giving him letters to deliver beyond the grave?  You never think of these things when you're twelve.  You think people are always going to be around in the years to come.  They'll be there to deliver your letters.  You think you'll have it all figured out.  You never see anything bad coming your way.  So yeah, I'm glad he opened the letters.  I'm glad they didn't just sit in a drawer as a mystery that he'd never know the answer to.  I'm glad he got a kick out of the whole thing.  I'm glad I can look back on it all with a smile.  When it's all said and done, that's more important to me than shaking hands with myself beside a mailbox.  Now, if I could only tell that kid that. 

(This post is also available in extra cheesy version.)