CREATIVE NONFICTION

The Time Machine Is Broken (And I’m the One Who Keeps Fixing It)

On the strange humiliation of outgrowing someone your old self still knows how to summon

Photo by Cliff Johnson on Unsplash

I fixed the time machine again this morning.

This is getting embarrassing.

Not because it breaks (everything breaks eventually, clocks included, ask the Hatter) but because I’m very good at fixing it now.

I know exactly which wire to touch. Which lever resets the display. Which sequence of small repairs gets me back to the present tense.

Again.

I’m no longer surprised by the breaking. Instead, I’m surprised by how brief the repaired version lasts before something sends me back.

Today it was a perfume.

Not even yours, specifically. Just the category of it.

Someone walked past me in a bookstore, and it’s always a bookstore, isn’t it? The universe has opinions, and for approximately 0.3 seconds, I wasn’t in a bookstore at all.

I was somewhere else. Sometime else. Sitting across from a person who thought the best thing to do at 2am was make a dented pot of pasta and ask me impossible questions.

And I, for reasons I’ve now had extensive time to examine, thought this was extraordinary.

I hate this. I hate it with the specific, practiced hatred of someone who has left the table, found better tables, is genuinely having a wonderful time at the new tables, and still, still, finds herself falling down the same rabbit hole because someone nearby chose the wrong cologne.

What nobody tells you about leaving Wonderland:

The exit works.

You walk out, the door closes, and the garden goes quiet. You return to a world with functioning clocks and people who answer questions directly and tea that arrives at a temperature suggesting someone planned ahead.

This part is fine. This part is actually great.

I have made my peace with seven o’clock. Seven o’clock is excellent. Seven o’clock has things to do.

But the Hatter doesn’t disappear.

He just becomes a glitch.

Not a wound. Not a ghost in the tragic sense. More like a rogue line of code the system failed to delete.

Everything runs beautifully and then, without warning:

error. unexpected value. returning to previous state.

1:00… 3:00… 1:00… 1:00… 3:00…

The machine takes me back. I fix it. The machine takes me back. I fix it.

I have fixed it in Berlin. I have fixed it in airports. I have fixed it in the cooking aisle of a grocery store because, apparently, rosemary is an accomplice.

I fix it faster now. The repairs are almost automatic.

But I’m starting to wonder if the problem is the machine at all, or if I simply built something that considers this location home.

Bored.

That’s the truly insulting part.

I’m not even sad about it anymore. I’m bored.

I’ve been haunted by more interesting things. The memory of a time I was genuinely afraid, or genuinely certain, or genuinely wrong in ways that changed something; those hauntings feel proportionate.

They have weight. They arrive with the gravity of things that mattered.

This one arrives smelling like a department store and immediately starts asking riddles.

I know all the riddles. I know how none of them resolve.

I know that the answer to “why is a raven like a writing desk” was never the point; the point was the asking, the loop of it, the permission to sit inside a question without demanding it go anywhere.

I spent a long time thinking that was beautiful.

I still think it was beautiful.

But there is a specific, heavy relief in outgrowing the need to solve people. I used to think spending three days decoding a cryptic mood or managing a manufactured crisis was a sign of passion. Now I just recognize it as an astonishing waste of time.

I’m also bored of it.

Here’s the thing about Alice:

She wasn’t enchanted by Wonderland because it was magical.

She was enchanted because she was bored before she fell. The rabbit hole found her at exactly the right moment: restless, underestimated, looking for somewhere her particular kind of intelligence could roam without hitting walls.

I fell in at the right moment, too. I was exactly the kind of person who would find a broken clock romantic.

But Alice grows up. Not because Wonderland fails her (it doesn’t; it’s still there, presumably still ridiculous, still serving tea to no one) but because she has a different relationship to boredom now.

She can sit inside a question without needing it to spiral.

She doesn’t need the maze.

I don’t need the maze. I just need the machine to stop taking me back to it every time someone walks past wearing the wrong perfume.

You were the funniest person in any room that contained you.

I should probably say that somewhere in here.

Because it’s true. And because I’ve spent a lot of words being annoyed and not enough acknowledging that the annoyance and the affection are not opposites.

You were genuinely, specifically funny in a way that required you: your timing, your particular chaos, the way you’d find the crack in any serious moment and put your finger in it until everyone fell through.

I had fun. Genuinely.

The table was good.

I’m annoyed because the table was good, and because good things are supposed to stay contained in their timeline, but instead, this one keeps leaking into bookstores.

I’m not asking for the time back.

I’m asking the machine to update its definition of home.

The perfume faded. The bookstore reassembled itself.

I bought nothing, which felt like winning.

Here is what I’ve learned about haunting:

It doesn’t mean you want them back.

It means you built a version of yourself that only existed at that table: a self that found broken clocks romantic, that thought 2am pasta was a personality, that confused chaos for depth.

This isn’t about wanting the person back.

It’s about grieving the self you had to abandon in order to leave.

Everyone has a naive, reckless version of themselves they had to kill off to finally grow up, and the haunting happens when that ghost occasionally demands to be remembered.

And that version doesn’t disappear just because you walked out.

The machine keeps returning because you filed that address under home before you knew what home was supposed to feel like.

Fixing it isn’t forgetting.

It’s just telling the machine, again and again, with the patience of someone who has done this in Berlin and in airports and in the cooking aisle of a grocery store, that you live somewhere else now.

I fixed the machine.

It’s working now.

Until it isn’t, and then I’ll fix it again, and we’ll do this until the wiring finally learns that I live at seven o’clock. That I’ve been here long enough to unpack, to leave shoes by the door, to stop treating the present tense like a place I’m only visiting.

The clock on my wall says 13:27.

In a garden that exists on no map, it’s still six o’clock. The tea is still going cold. Someone is still pouring it for no one.

I don’t miss the tea.

I miss that I was the kind of person who thought cold tea was enough.

But I fixed the machine.

And today, that’s the whole story.