What would it be like
to program a time machine,
not with dates,
but with memories --
the color of grass in late summer,
the taste of a lover’s kiss,
the smell of cookies baking,
the weightlessness at the top of a swing’s arc
the sound of rain on a nursery roof --
orienting travel within the timestream
based on that which makes us
most fundamentally ourselves?

 

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Navigation of Memory by Elizabeth Barrette
originally published in the Summer 2012 print edition