Time Warp

“Why does time seem to move forward? It’s a riddle that’s puzzled physicists for well over a century, and they’ve come up with numerous theories to explain time’s arrow. The latest, though, suggests that while time moves forward in our universe, it may run backwards in another, mirror universe that was created on the ‘other side’ of the Big Bang.”

– PBS Nova, “Big Bang May Have Created a Mirror Universe Where Time Runs Backwards,” December 2014

If time runs backwards, Brad and I will kiss on the dock in front of cheering friends and family, speak our vows, hold hands, and let go.

A procession of loved ones will follow me up the aisle and into a quiet room where someone will draw the curtains closed, and my mother’s hands will shake as she pries each of the rough cord loops from the ivory buttons running down my back.

One night, four years after our wedding and hours before someone else’s, Brad and I will take a walk along the river and kiss for the last time. To mark the occasion, we’ll make a final trip to his favorite bar, and over bitter Manhattans, we’ll share what we’ve learned about growing apart and what we fear about growing lonely, and later, at his friend’s wedding, just before the sun comes up, I’ll teach him how to dance “The Time Warp.”

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I learned the dance at age sixteen.

At a video rental store with my mother, I spotted The Rocky Horror Picture Show from the end of an aisle and tried to seem uninterested in the lips and stockings on its cover. My mother asked if I’d ever seen it. No, nothing like it. She brought it to the checkout counter.

Leaving that place that soon would not exist, my mother told me about others she believed had already vanished: Theaters where people gathered at midnight in corsets and heels, and danced in the aisles, and threw rice in the air. That was the right way to watch Rocky Horror, she said, but nobody did that anymore, as far as she knew, so a living room screening would have to do.

I watched it with a friend, Staci. A thousand queer stories could begin like this one, and as many fair critiques could follow. Rocky Horror is dated, queer cosplay for straights. Frank-N-Furter is a predatory megalomaniac and terrible representation. Meatloaf is there. But still, I will always remember the moment when Tim Curry came down the elevator tapping his heel, and Staci turned to me with a shocked, giddy expression and said, “I think something just happened to me,” and we erupted into the kind of laughter that is only possible when you are sixteen and have just discovered that a person can be both strange and beautiful, and sexuality is both vast and specific, and you are both known and loved. Between one tap of a glittered heel and another, we glimpsed a world of possibility.

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What happens to causality if time runs backwards?

Some physicists suspect that understanding the order of the universe may require abandoning the notion of cause and effect altogether. Consider superposition, in which a particle or system exists in multiple states simultaneously. Consider the possibility that A causes B and B causes A.

But for the sake of simplicity, let’s say that if time runs backwards, Brad will take a deer skull from a centerpiece at our wedding and bring it to the last apartment we share, where it will sit on a shelf overlooking the kitchen, releasing dust and cobwebs until we pack up our life together and it goes with him to the first apartment he lives in alone. For a while, the skull will sit on a doorstep outside, and over the course of days, passing creatures will cover it in small offerings of flesh and fur. And one winter morning, Brad will affix their creation to a warming body that will draw its blood from the earth as he climbs into the branches of a tree nearby to watch its life begin.

If time runs backwards, not long after Brad and I pack away our life together, I’ll stop at a corner store in search of a birthday card but will find myself, instead, in the anniversary section. I’ll pick up a card that says “for my husband” and will take a moment to smile at the joy of having known him. I’ll pick up another that says “for my wife” and will take a moment to cry at the joy of knowing myself.

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I’d lived twenty-one years before I knew I could love a woman. Or perhaps I should say before I felt certain or before I accepted. I’d had my suspicions, which perhaps I should call fears.

The moment of knowing arrived in 2008—the year I voted in my first presidential election; the year Proposition 8 banned gay marriage in California; the year that one Pew Research poll found, for the first time in history, that a majority of Americans didn’t oppose gay marriage, which wasn’t the same as supported, but was something, at least.

I was sitting in a darkened theater, one of two hundred strangers watching a woman sing about the mysteries of love. As she spun to face us, her hair settled heavy against her collarbone, and I thought how beautiful it would be to brush it from her shoulder in the morning, and for one silent, breathless, technicolor instant, time stood still.

There are physicists who believe that time does not exist on its own—that it is an emergent property of the universe, which is to say it arises from the interactions between matter, and fields, and us. But in that moment—for lack of a better word—time seemed to have its own weight and velocity. It struck me: Twenty-one years of unknowing or not-quite-knowing or trying not to know. What had I lost and why?

I remembered a friend from middle school, Anna, and the sleepover where a group of girls triple-dog-dared us to remove our clothes and kiss each other’s skin. When we refused, they blocked the door and said, “What’s the matter? Are you lesbians or something?”

The hypocrisy was lost on all of us, and months later, once Anna and I had mostly stopped speaking, I pasted into my diary a photo of her and the girl she called friend after me and wrote beneath it the most hateful word I could think of: Lesbians.

Which is not to say that one instance led to the other or that either was remarkable. On the playground back then, “gay” was another word for “stupid,” “uncool,” or “strange,” and on television “queer” was another word for “victim” or “predator,” and in Congress “homosexuality” spelled the beginning of the end and the end of family.

Which is not to say we were “products of our time,” or that such a thing exists. In any era, there are people who make of themselves something better, and all of us together create the time we live in.

This is only to say that, in the theater that night, I tried to count up the number of hands I’d neglected to hold over the years, the embraces I’d cut short, the people I might have loved and loved better. And I wondered then, and have on occasion since, how much one moment predicts another.

In one, I am a child, attending my first Sunday mass.

In another, I am grown, standing in a park after sunset.

A priest is declaring that women who love women burn for eternity.

A woman is saying good night, and I am watching her go. I think I might love her, but she’ll never know.

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Imagine two lovers’ first meeting as their last. After years in each other’s company and clutter and changing moods, they meet, finally, in some neutral locale—at a bus stop or a bar or a friend’s dinner party. There, they reenact in near perfect detail the moment they have spent years imagining: One notices for the last time the spray of freckles across the nose of the other, who notices the cascading melody of the other’s laugh. They lock eyes a final time and become strangers.

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In the early nineties, two men in their twenties met at a bar in Cincinnati, Ohio. John was “comfortable in his own skin,” which “scared the daylights” out of Jim. At a New Year’s Eve party a few months later, they “fell in love at third sight.”

In the decades that followed, they built a life together. Shared a home. Collected art. But in 2011, at the age of forty-six, John was diagnosed with ALS, a neurodegenerative disease with no cure. His body began to fail. Within a year, Jim had become his full-time caregiver. Of this time, Jim would later say, “It was an honor to care for John at home, it was a joy to keep him safe and comfortable, to spend as much time together as possible.”

The year after John’s diagnosis, Maryland legalized gay marriage by popular vote, and in 2013, the law took effect. And so, with the help of their friends and family, John and Jim chartered a medical jet and flew from Cincinnati to Baltimore, where, in the small plane cabin, sitting on the tarmac, they held hands and said, “I do.”

Under Ohio’s law at the time, John and Jim’s marriage lasted one flight home. Had one of them been a child who’d received parental and judicial permission to marry, Ohio would have honored their union. But because they were men who had loved each other for more than twenty years, their marriage became null and void upon returning home. When John died, his death certificate would name no surviving spouse. When his body returned to the earth in his family’s plot, at a cemetery that only allowed descendants and spouses to be buried together, Jim would never again lie beside him.

John Arthur and Jim Obergefell filed a lawsuit against the state, which later joined five others to become Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 US Supreme Court case that ruled that the right for same-sex couples to marry is protected by the Constitution—or, in the words of Justice Kennedy, that a state cannot require two men who have committed their lives to one another to “remain strangers even in death.”

After the ruling, Jim said to John, “I wish you could know our marriage can never be erased.” John had not lived to hear it.

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After our vows, Brad and I walked up the aisle hand-in-hand to the quiet, windowed room where my mother had helped me into my dress two hours before. From the window, we watched our loved ones walk the path from the ceremony to the reception, and from the procession, Staci emerged, smiling, and tapped on the glass.

Between one tap and another, I traveled fifteen years to 2004, the start of our senior year of high school—the year that Ohioans voted to define marriage as “between one man and one woman,” Massachusetts became the first state to legalize gay marriage, and the American Dialect Society voted “red state, blue state, purple state” the Word of the Year. That year, our friend Ryan told us there did still exist a place where strangers gathered at midnight and danced and sang in the aisles; and one Friday night, he and Staci and I met at my house, piled our skirts and stockings and makeup on the living room floor, and drew from the mess our new and vibrant selves.

There are plenty of houses where this would never have happened. Plenty of parents who’d be horrified to know that my mother was the one who bought me the red satin corset I wore. Plenty of mothers who would have screamed at the sight of Ryan standing behind me in the downstairs bathroom, one fishnetted foot on the counter for leverage, yanking on my corset’s laces. Plenty of possible outcomes Ryan must have considered the moment he heard my mother’s footsteps on the stairs and froze; and none of them, I’d guess, were what actually happened, which was my mother rounding the corner and saying, “Do you want any pie or juice before you go?”

Last year, according to The Trevor Project, nearly half of LGBTQ+ youth considered suicide and one in ten attempted it. The year before that, according to a Human Rights Commission report, more than half experienced parental rejection of their identity.

That night, twenty-one years ago, in the car, Staci, Ryan, and I repeated my mother’s words to each other and laughed all the way to the theater. Yes, the laughter came partly from the juxtaposition of an innocent inquiry before a bawdy show. But for me, anyway, it came mostly from the exuberant joy of rushing headlong into the world knowing that “loved” is another word for “home.”

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What becomes of marriage in a world in reverse?

Is it the slow process of becoming strangers? Unlearning how the other likes their coffee and eggs? Forgetting the punchline to that old, tired joke, which grows funnier with every repetition?

If time runs backwards, marriages will never begin at an altar; they’ll begin in all the places they end in our universe: In a lawyer’s office, or a courtroom, or a hospital bed. There will be people who arrive in life already married—paired with, loved by, and legally bound to another person—which, I suppose, wouldn’t be so different from how it is for some of us, the lucky of us, in our universe, to be born.

If time runs backwards, this is how I hope Brad and I will begin: One of us will take our first breath already in the company of the other, who will have been sitting beside them for what has already felt like ages, waiting to be the first person on Earth to love them. ⏱