i would like, i think, to write a time-travel story about a woman who after tremendous heartbreak decides to seek out her former lover in his past. no spoilers there, she has never known him this early in his life, a young man, maybe an undergraduate, no, too young, i’ll make him a graduate student. what would younger he have made of her, this new-in-towner, the older woman pursuing him doggedly. what does he make of the certainty of her desire, her pressing over-familiarity?but in due course all the same things that made the relationship work so well in the future make it work in the past, and for a time they are radiantly happy together. she soon becomes apprehensive: at some point she knows her younger self is going to show up in the same small city, make that charlottesville because i cannot think of small college towns as anything other than charlottesville, why not, there aren’t any novellas set in charlottesville are there?
in this version of the story i’d have him leave her for her younger self, which would hurt her like the devil — precisely because they were the same person. to lose a lover to another woman, a younger woman, was wrenching enough in any tale of this kind, but to herself, now! but it must happen, mustn’t it? he must want the younger her when she did show up, let him go: the time loop requires it (she’s read all the right books.) more: she would not sabotage her younger self’s happiness, her own happiness that she remembers. (but oh, to have lost the same man, not once but twice!)
so trapped out of her own time, she lives on in the double anguish, of watching her younger self replace her beside her lover, their lover, no, still her lover — radiant and young, with barely suppressed jealousy and longing and rage, and knowing too, with dreadful premonition, that a time is coming, when younger she will come to that same, devastating heartbreak, that drove her to return to the past.
but then perhaps in another version of the story, we’ll spare her that. she needn’t see her younger self arrive. perhaps in this timeline she dies. perhaps her arrival in the past, her death, would even be necessary to start the love cycle. who knows, perhaps she tells him enough — that she knows him from the future — and he believed her. he wouldn’t know when that would be and how that is going to happen, only that some day in his future a younger version of her will be showing up. so that he looks out for her, puts himself where he will meet her, and when younger she shows up innocently she is startled by his instant ardour — now she is the pursued — yet there is gentleness and protectiveness too, in his pursuit — and curiosity and surprise — for he has never known her this young…
or perhaps there needn’t even be a revelation and recognition — our teenage selves, afterall, doesn’t look like our forty-year-old selves, nor hold the same views, nor even speak the same way — time does that to us later. she tells him nothing; she dies. but perhaps all it takes to spark his desire is something about the young woman’s passing resemblance to her older self, some youthful mannerism that had survived the adolescent to flourish in the woman here in its original enactment, which trigger memories of his dead lover — what was the rossetti poem — some veil did fall / i knew it all of yore? but had she never gone back in time — his older and her younger self would never have loved.
i think i like the former better, a kind of elena ferrante story of a (double) emotional disintegration and with a time travel element, with the emotional centre built on our doomed older-younger self. yes, when i have time (but when?) one day i shall write this.
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