By Someone Who Thought Without Knowing the Terms
It began with a simple question:
“What would I have been doing if I missed school yesterday?”
Harmless. Ordinary. But it stuck.
I couldn’t shake it off.
So I followed it—
What if I hadn’t gone last week?
Last month?
Last year?
…
What would I have done instead?
Who might I have become?
And then it hit me:
Every small change rewrites everything.
Miss a moment, and your entire trajectory shifts.
A different day leads to a different thought.
A different thought becomes a different choice.
A different choice births a different life.
That’s when I saw it—
Cause and effect, blooming endlessly like an invisible web.
Even the smallest interactions—
A glance from someone—
It could plant a seed:
A feeling of shame,
Or a surge of confidence,
Each with its own chain of consequences.
That one glance
alters how they feel,
which alters how they act,
which alters how they interact with other people and other physical matter—
and those people, and the effects of those matters on other people, too, are changed in turn.
And if you trace it back far enough—
you could find the root of the glance,
and the root of that root,
and so on…
on and on, endlessly.
This is the butterfly effect,
but raw— without the name.
This is determinism,
but lived, not learned.
This is chaos theory,
before I ever knew there were words for it.
Back then, when people talked about time travel—
changing some big thing in the past to fix the present—
I couldn’t relate.
They didn’t understand.
It’s not the big things that matter.
It’s the tiniest ones.
You go back in time, just for a second—
and step on a leaf.
A worm dies.
A bird goes hungry.
A seed never drops.
A tree never grows.
A stranger never rests in its shade.
A love story never begins.
A life is never born.
One leaf… and the world changes.
That’s not science fiction.
That’s reality.
That’s why time— at least the way we imagine it— can’t be real.
It’s not a line you can walk forward or back on.
Time is just our word for change.
For entropy.
For memory.
For the illusion of movement through something that doesn’t really exist.
The 'time' that physics describes— as a dimension— is something else entirely.
I was terrible at studies. Always behind.
But these thoughts?
I arrived at them alone.
No books.
No teachers.
No lectures.
Just questions that wouldn’t leave me alone.