Time travel according to Una

Una says, 'I wonder what happened to Amelia Earhart. Freddy said there was crackling sounds on her radio, like she was asking for help, but I don’t believe that, do you?'

Una says, 'I’d like to meet Amelia Earhart and ask her.'

This leads to a conversation about time travel. Una says, 'If you go back in time would you meet yourself?' 

I talk about continuity. I say, 'Maybe its impossible to time travel and see yourself.'

'And see your butt,' Avery says.

'I think it’s possible,' says Fred.

'Just ill advised?' I ask.

'But it’s impossible to time travel,' says Una. 'Because absolutely everybody would have to do it.'

'Why?'

'There couldn’t be a life without you. If you weren’t in that world everything else would have to change. So everybody would have to come with you.'

And then, just little by little, there wasn't any big epiphany or anything, I came to see that things were never really right between us and that they never would have been. It took about two years, maybe longer, to understand that. And now she's married and I'm not, but I'm really happy we're not together.

And it makes me realize that I have been time traveling. It's just that I've been traveling into the future at 60 minutes per hour. And maybe that's how we fix the past.

Sean Cole, 'The Leap' This American Life

This conversation has been sitting in my drafts for months. The other day, after we'd time travelled into the future at a rate of 60 minutes per hour, Una tells me she'd like to work in a museum, because 'she's very interested in Amelia Earhart'.