The Time Traveler's Wife

I'm faltering. I don't know how much longer I'll be able to take it. It's not what you think, so stop your disproportionate thinking. It's trivial. And it hurts.


And for your enjoyment, since I cannot entertain you today, an excerpt from one of my favorite books, "The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenigger:


Clare: It's hard being left behind. I wait for Henry, not knowing where he is, wondering if he's okay. It's hard to be the one who stays.

I keep myself busy. Time goes faster that way.

I go to sleep alone, and wake up alone. I take walks. I work until I'm tired. I watch the wind play with the trash that's been under the snow all winder. Everything seems simple until you think about it. Why is love intensified by absence?

Long ago, men went to sea, and women waiting for them, standing on the edge of the water, scanning the horizon for the tiny ship. Now, I wait for Henry. He vanishes unwillingingly, without warning. I wait for him. Each moment that I wait feels like a year, an eternity. Each moment I can see infinite moments lined up, waiting. Why has he gone where I cannot follow?



Henry: How does it feel? How does it feel?

Sometimes it feels as though your attention has wandered for just an instant. Then, with a start, you realize that the book you were holding, the red plaid cotton shirt white buttons, the favorite black jeans with an almost-hole in one heel, the living room the about to whistle tea kettle in the kitchen, all of these have vanished. You are standing, naked as a jaybird, up to your ankles in ice water in a ditch along an unidentified rural route. You wait a minute to see if maybe you will just snap right back to you book, your apartment, et cetera. After about five minutes of swearing and shivering and hoping to hell you can just disappear, you start walking in any directions, which will eventually yield a farmhouse, where you have the option of stealing or explaining. Stealing will sometimes land you in jail, but explaining is more tedious and time-consuming and involves lying anyway, and also sometimes results in being hauled off to jail, so what the hell.

Sometimes you feel as thought you have stood up to quickly even if you are lying in bed half asleep. You hear blood rushing in your head, feel vertiginous falling sensations. Your hands and feet are tingling and then they aren't there at all. You've mislocated yourself again. It only takes an instant, you have just enough time to try to hold on, to flail around, (possibly damaging yourself or valuable possessions.) and then you are skidding across the forest-green-carpeted hallway of a Motel 6 in Athens, Ohio at 4:16 am., Monday, August 6, 1981, and you hit your head on someone's door, causing this person, a Ms. Tina Schulman from Philadelphia, to open this door and start screaming because there's a naked, carpet-burned man passed out at her feet.

Sometimes you feel euphoric. Everything is sublime and has an aura and suddenly you are intensely nauseated and then you are gone.

How does it feel?

It feels exactly like one of those dreams in which you suddenly realize that you have to take a test you haven't studied for and you aren't wearing any clothes. And you've left your wallet at home.

When I am out there, in time, I am inverted, changed into a desperate version of myself. I become a thief, a vagrant, an animal who runs and hides. I startle old women and amaze children. I am a trick, an illusion of the highest order, so incredible that I am actually true.

Clare, always Clare. Clare in the morning, sleepy and crumple-faced. Clare with her arms plunging into the papermaking vat, pulling up the mold and shaking it so, and so, to meld the fibers. Clare reading, with her hair hanging over the back of the chair, massaging balm into her hands before bed. Clare's low voice in my ear often.

I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow.




Buy it. Now.