Nice To Meet Myself

What would you do if you ran into yourself right now? Same age, clothes, hairstyle - your mirror image, but walking and talking on its own? When I was a kid, I used to scan crowds for myself. I used to hope that the doorbell would ring one day and it would be my adult self, back from the future to tell me what to do. Now that I'm my adult self, I wonder what my child self would think if he saw me today. I told all this to a coworker and he replied that I must have had a pretty overactive imagination. I'll take that as a compliment, but there's also the fact that when I behaved badly as a kid, my mom used to tell me to go outside and not come back until I'd found the "real" me. So I guess you could say she instilled me with this idea that there's another me out there somewhere, and that maybe he's better behaved. Or maybe I got all this from Back to the Future (although I seriously doubt that, because the main character didn't run into himself until the second movie in 1989, and I was already a tween by then, plus the concept of interacting with yourself in a different time was portrayed as "bad").

Anyway, I just finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife (which is being adapted as a movie August 14), and it's full of the aforementioned kinda stuff, and I loved it. I read the first twenty pages a month ago, and then I didn't read anymore for a couple of weeks because I just didn't want the book to ever end. Unlike most love stories, it's got blood, guts, loss of limbs, a suicide, and several miscarriages, but those are hardly the reasons I loved it. The coworker who loaned me her copy of the book called it "weird but in a good way," but I didn't think it was weird at all. I'll admit it's not your typical boy-meets-girl, etc. love story. It spans 100+ years and the timeline jumps back and forth constantly. This only added to the appeal for me, and I found myself re-reading earlier chapters, not to keep track of what was going on, but to find new meaning in otherwise straightforward dialogue. If anything was weird, it would've been the twist on what "childhood sweethearts" can mean. I learned so much about trust and patience and the commitment a couple makes to help each other be their best individual selves. Imagine if you knew exactly what your partner was going to be like in ten years, would you still commit?