Time Traveling

She’s right, my sister-in-law is.

Andrea had found a similarity between a character in a book she’d been reading and myself. She wanted to recommend this book to me but also wanted to be sensitive to the possibility that I might to make a connection between this character in the story, and it might be painful for me.

I haven’t gotten very far yet in the book and already I’m crying. Holy cow, I can so relate to this storybook person it’s killing me inside, great book by-the-way. The book is called the Time Traveler’s Wife and the character is Henry.

Henry travels through time, backwards, forwards and all around. It’s called Chrono-impairment, an uncontrollable popping in and out of the present to other points in time. It’s uncomfortable when it happens. He disappears and reappears taking nothing with him so he’s naked as he appears. Sometimes he finds himself in the freezing cold or sliding down a carpeted hallway getting a dozy of a carpet burn.

Here’s how I relate to this character, I, myself pop back and forth through the present with spurts of energy. Like an on and off switch, my body either is working or it's shut down. And like Henry, I never know when my impairment will rear it’s ugly head and take me away into that “crash and burn”, leaving me immoble, stuck in bed. It is a most uncontrollable thing and happens to me at the most inconvenient moments. It limits my life on a grand scale and as I continue to read about how Henry deals with his disability, and it’s interruptions, I sigh and shake my head in a knowing fashion. What can I say, I know just how he feels.

Sometimes Henry’s nauseous from the time travel and throws up — that too we have in common only I don’t throw up — I just have trouble eating.

I’m having one of my bad days today. I can hardly stand to sit up let alone write these paragraphs, and just like the time traveler, poof I'll soon find myself back in bed. But no fear I’ll be back at some point I always am.