Written on every page

Take back your TARDIS, not for me your Flux Capacitor. No, for I can travel through time merely through the words on the page.

True I am restricted to traveling back along my own timeline and observing all in duality through my eyes now and my mind then but this is time travel well enough. Diaries, notebooks, scrawls and drawings...each a ticket for me to become a tourist in my past life.

And these tickets were just waiting to be picked up. In between the pages of abandoned books on dusty shelves. Crammed together, dogeared, stained but each one a portal to a moment in my time.

I relive now the all consuming crushes of my teenage years; the night we walked home from seeing a band, illicit alcohol keeping us warm as we snuggled in a hedgerow and gazed at the stars, dreaming; dark days where I was beyond lost and didn't even realise it; the gutteral thrill of so much music; marriage, both times; getting broken, being fixed.

All this is there. And more. There are rides I still am not brave enough to take. I hold a sheaf of papers the words on which will tear me from the here and now and strand me with the me of a decade ago. I would read it if I were brave. I would read it if I could relive it with more than my mind and reach out and hold her, my, hand. I would if my screams of 'it'll be alright' were anything but silence to the past me.

I cannot though, and so, cowardly, I cannot. Those words on faded paper are still too raw. I do not want to remember the phone call, the fear, the primal scream, the way my world stopped turning and then began again but slightly tilted. I know these things without reading the words but that ticket to that time would make me *feel* them and I cannot do that.

Some things written are best left unread, but read or not I now know I am there in every word on every page. Time to put myself back on the shelf.