Time can become meaningless once you realize that while it moves forward your life moves in a circle, always repeating events, but never fully recapturing what once was. What is now is always a simulacrum of the past. Even your memories will reflect this when you realize you can’t quite remember – not exactly, and not enough to distinguish between the past and present.
Your memories changes with time. You are always remembering the same event, but as time shifts so does the memory. How is that possible? How can an event, which has happened already, change? It doesn’t, but it does. The event, the physical manifestation of what occurred is fixed. Your memory however, dependent upon your interpretation of the event, changes. At different points in time the significance of an isolated moment, a memory, shifts, and that is what you remember. It is your interpretation of that moment that gives it meaning, and as your perspective changes, the moment becomes redefined.
What happens when multiple people remember the same event? Even when they agree on the actions that occurred, they will still see it differently. They each viewed it from a different angle. Does this mean that each perspective becomes a different fragment of the same event, or that the event itself becomes replicated to accommodate multiple facets?
And what happens when a memory belongs to only one person, and they can no longer remember? As they completely forget, if no one else witnessed or knew about the event, does that somehow void the action from the universe? This is kind of a different take on the “if a tree falls but no one hears it” question, except I am not questioning whether the tree made a noise when it fell. I want to know if the tree fell at all.
A lady in her kitchen moves a kettle from the counter onto a shelf, an event so un-noteworthy (like so many others) that she never tells anyone of it (why would she?). One day she dies, thus the memory absolutely no longer exists, with her, or anyone else. Did the kettle ever move?
You get older, but that doesn’t mean time travels in only one direction; as the days pass you find it is Monday again, December again, and always again. It all is as it once was, except slightly off. And all of the memories you accumulate play in a loop on repeat serving as the soundtrack while you mime out your life, striking a different pose each time the same song comes on as if you have never heard it before because each time it sounds so different you cannot recognize it. Years have passed, and you have come full circle, ready for another round.
