Time is weird. Let’s just acknowledge that.

We experience the passing of time in odd and inconsistent ways and it shows in the way we describe it. Time flies, it crawls, it slips by, it stands still. Some months always seem to drag on (February, I’m looking at you) while others are gone in the blink of an eye (July, where’d you go?). Time seems to move slower when we’re stressed, bored, or sad and faster when we’re busy or happy. After all, time flies when you’re having fun and a watched pot never boils.

Here in 2020, time is even weirder than normal. Most of the routines, events, and traditions we use to mark time are either altered or completely gone (except bills, those are still like clockwork). The added stress combined with often monotonous days makes time slow and lethargic, but when we look back there are few stand-out events to show that time really is passing. As a result, most of us have noticed that our sense of time is a bit wonky. I sometimes struggle to remember not just the day of the week, but the month as well.

Maybe it’s the weird time dilation of this year (and maybe it’s the fact that I recently finished binging the second season of The Umbrella Academy), but I’ve recently gotten (back) into time travel fiction.

I was nine years old when I first encountered time travel in a book – Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Harry and Hermione only travel a few hours back in time, but Merlin’s beard do they change a lot (somehow without actually changing anything at all). It was complex and mind-bending and I fell in love immediately.

Since then, I’ve read and watched all kinds of time travel books, movies, and shows. From classics like H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, to the quirky long-running BBC show Doctor Who, to blockbusters like Avengers: Endgame, there are so many different theories on what time travel would look like if it were actually possible.

Time travel has a lot of appeal. Since it’s not possible (that we know of), time travel stories are all about speculation. What do we think the world will be like in the future? What would the world be like now if we could change the past? What would the past look like from a modern perspective? Time travel offers not only an escape from our current reality but a way to imagine our reality differently or to view it in a different light.

So if you’re reminiscing about how things were last summer or worrying about how things will be in the future, I recommend escaping into a time travel story for a while. The world will still be here when you get back.