Hello everyone. I need to push today's chapter to Sunday. Here's something else I wrote, a long time ago when I thought I might write a time travel novel:

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Time travel is a slippery concept for a little girl.

When I was almost six I threw a temper tantrum upon finding out that I couldn’t have a birthday party in zero gravity like my friend Samantha had several months ago.

I threw another one when my mom, impatient at my incessant pestering, informed me that my friend Samantha couldn’t come to my party, and the reason was because she had never been born.

When my tears of impotent childish rage dried and I was freed from my time-out, I again pestered her until she sat me down with a piece of paper and some markers and did her best to explain it to me in a way she thought I might understand.

“Remember when we spent that day by the river?” she asked.

I did. We had fried chicken and cake and the ants got all over everything, and Willy pushed me down in the mud and got my dress all dirty and made me cry. I nodded.

“Well,” she said, “try to imagine that this is that river.” She drew a set of wavy blue lines on the paper and looked up at me.

“And there should be grass,” I reminded her, pointing. She patiently picked out a green marker and drew a few tufts of grass. “And us,” I said. She picked out a black marker and started to draw a stick figure in the river.

“Hey!” I exclaimed. “We go here, silly.” I pointed to the bank, where the tufts of grass were.

“Normally you would be right. But I want you to imagine that this river isn’t really a river.” She finished drawing two figures, one tall and one short. She drew the word ‘Mommy’ over the tall figure, and ‘Rose’ over the short one. I leaned over the paper, curious.

“What is it instead?”

“Time,” she said, and drew the word ‘today’ under the figures in the river.

“Like a clock?”

“Sort of. A clock tells you what time it is during the day. But I was thinking a little bit more like a calendar.” She drew the words ‘yesterday’ and ‘tomorrow’ before and after the word ‘today’ under the river. “You know what else is in this river besides us?” she asked me.

I thought. “Fish?” I guessed.

“Yes.” She drew some stick fish in the river, then looked back at me. “What else?”

“Frogs?”

“Yes. Frogs too.” She drew a few frog-like blobs in each river. “But remember honey, it’s not a real river. Do we belong in a river?”

I shook my head no.

“But do we belong in time?”

I nodded my head yes this time, not really understanding but gathering from her tone what the answer was supposed to be.

“What you have to understand, honey, is that everything is in time.”

“Everything?”

“Everything,” she confirmed, but I was still skeptical. “Pick something,” she challenged me.

“Mmmm...our car,” I said.

The car went in the river above the word ‘today’.

“Our house.”

The house went next to the car.

“The sun!” I exclaimed, and when she drew that with no hesitation, “The moon!” which she drew as well. I stopped, amazed. “Time is big enough to fit the sun and the moon?”

“It sure is. And notice, honey, that all that’s just today. Were you here yesterday?” I nodded, and she drew a stick figure in the river over ‘yesterday’. “Was I here yesterday?” I shook my head. She wasn’t here a lot. “Well, no, I wasn’t here at home, but I was still in the same time.” She drew a taller stick figure. “And so were fish, and frogs, and the car, and the house, and the sun, and the moon.” She drew each as she said it.

“Do you think all those things will still be here tomorrow?” When I nodded, she drew everything a third time over the word ‘tomorrow’.

“Here comes the really hard part. Now I need you to imagine that there is a whole other river, almost exactly like the first one.” She drew an identical set of wavy blue lines. “This river is also time. Only on this river, ‘today’ is over here.” She wrote ‘today’ to line up with the word ‘tomorrow’ under the first river. “And since it’s pretty much the same river, what do you think belongs in it?”

“All the same stuff?”

“That’s right, all the same stuff.” She drew everything again three more times. I regarded it doubtfully. Now there were two of me in two different ‘todays’. I wasn’t sure I liked it very much that there was another girl out there just like me, playing with all my toys.

“Look at this,” my mom said, pointing at the first river. “Here’s you and me today. And here,” she said, pointing directly beneath, “is you and me yesterday.” She drew a line straight across, connecting the two. “What do you think would happen if we climbed out of this river, and jumped into this one?”

I looked at the drawing for a long time.

“Then we would be in yesterday?”

“Very good!”

“And I could talk to myself?”

“Yeah. That would be silly, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah.” I giggled a little.

“Yeah. Now, I need you to pay really close attention to this part. I need you to imagine that there aren’t just two rivers. Really, there are more rivers than you can ever imagine. Like if there were rivers as far you as you could see, and then you walked to the end of how far you could see, and once you got there all you could see were more rivers. Rivers and rivers and rivers.” She drew line after wavy blue line on the page until she ran out of room.

“Rivers and rivers,” I repeated, trying to picture it.

“And some of them,” she continued, “are really far in the future. That’s where we came from--so far in the future that your friend Samantha, in the river we’re in right now, won’t be born for years and years and years. Do you kind of understand?”

“I think so.” I said.

“Good,” she said. She started to put away the markers.

“So, can Samantha come over tomorrow?”

Mother sighed.

Like I said, time travel is a slippery concept for a little girl. I did come away from that lesson with one thing, though: the way I imagine infinity. Rivers and rivers and rivers, extending forever past the horizon.