What about?

What about time travel? What about the speed of light?

What about an Infinite Telescope?

An Infinite Telescope happens when you've gone so far away and gone so fast that you can look back and see History.

Take a telescope with you on a trip to the outer edges of the universe. You have to have a very good telescope because it must be able to see an Infinite Distance, and you must have a very good spaceship because it must be able to go faster than The Speed of Light—which is very fast.

Now if you could travel a distance of sixty-one lightseconds in the span of one second, that means you would arrive one minute faster than the light you emitted when you left Earth. Then is the magic. Get out. Turn around. Look through your Telescope. You can see yourself shutting the hatch door, you see the rocket boosters explode like a dust mote smearing the green carpet of Earth, you see yourself streaking toward you like a ghost being reeled toward its body.

Now imagine you travel a distance of one lightyear in the span of a day. Get out. Turn around. Look through your Telescope—there, picking a white pumpkin from the pumpkin patch at the state fair. There, that night, too drunk to stand so your friend prepares for you a toothbrush with paste. There, falling asleep next to Delilah your rottweiler because you would never admit it but you still feel a pang of fear the moment light slowly sinks below your windowsill. There, you, one year younger, never knowing that with an Infinite Telescope you were watching yourself make History.

Next, try something bold. Travel a distance of two lightseconds every second and point your Telescope through the porthole at the back of the ship. See your life unfold in reverse. Inhale carbon dioxide. Breathe oxygen. Watch your hair grow stronger and see the kinks leave your body and watch your spirit lift. Watch your pen pass over a letter to your mother and see it drink words through the nib. Watch your fingernails grow into your hands.

And then you could find a moment. Slow down. Travel at The Speed of Light. Point your telescope back at that blue splotch in space called Earth. You have frozen time. You have stopped all of History and it will never start again. Focus in. Watch your small hand live inside your mother's that time after the park when you learned how to swing and when you learned what a Brontosaurus was. Watch that moment paralyzed in exhale. Watch the oak's branches split by the power line, and the cold wash of clouds above a neighbor's frozen garden. Watch blue lips never come. Watch houses never shaking.

And you could go on forever but the problem is you're hurtling through space and it feels like this moment is frozen in time but in reality you're simply traveling too fast and the Universe is only so big and you can only go so far before you run out of space—