So, someone's told you time heals all wounds, and they're going to have said it ironically or sarcasticcally or bitterly or without self-awareness or whatever, and it's all going to have been bullshit.

And you know it's bullshit, and I know it's bullshit, so let's talk about what it doesn't fix.

Time doesn't fix age, time doesn't fix cancer and time doesn't fix dead.

No, I'm not dying of cancer.

So let's walk.

Yes, I specifically said 'of cancer'. That wasn't me dodging, that was just you paying attention.

One sec, I need to hit the password. 

15092026. Yeah, the date. That's the plan, anyway. Been planning this a long while.

Welcome to the lab. Ha! You think that's weird, you should see the basement. But yeah, it's definitely not the sort of thing you'd normally see behind an auto shop is it?

Don't know what normally goes behind an auto shop. I think meth labs, honestly. 

No, this isn't- look, are meth labs this chrome? Chrome everywhere. Flashing lights. Tangled wires. Foggy air from all the evaporating liquid nitrogen. Even if you don't know what a meth lab looks like, you have to know it doesn't look like this.

It'd be hard to tie meth into my diatribe on time, too, let's be honest. 

So here's the thing. There's the chair, there's the wire, ignore the smell of burning lab animals. Early trials. Look, nothing's rusted, so it's clear there wasn't all that much blood. Ignore the scorchmarks.

I said-

Fuck it. 

Sixty years ago today my paternal grandfather flipped his car. Police instructional driver, wasn't wearing his seatbelt as he went over gravel. Either foul play or suicide.

After that, my paternal grandmother went through a series of abusive stepfathers to my Dad, alcoholics and addicts and abusers the lot of them. 

After that Dad went on to be the same. Got sent out to boarding schools, came home to that bullshit, rolled out to other boarding schools, became just as bad as his parents were.

Brilliant man. Coming out with his Econ. Masters, came out of the final exam with the fastest ever completion and the fastest perfect score still on record. I mean, it was in business, so he was still a bastard, but it was impressive is my point.

Then, after that, he raised me. Beatings on Christmas, addiction to hookers and MMORPGs in equal measure. Business gym culture, couldn't understand why his kids weren't pulling triathlon bullshit. Leaves Mum, spends all his pre-financial crisis earnings on a Dutch woman he marries half his age, fantastic.

Here's another thing time can't fix; it's cyclical. It keeps happening. Circles never stop themselves.

I get shipped off to boarding schools, I come home to that bullshit. Then financial crisis happens, he goes broke, takes it out even more on us and witholds child support and then some more dominoes fall and I'm in and out of hospitals with nothing but physics textbooks and a web connection to MIT's curriculum to keep me occupied until I'm in my early thirties.

Sorry for the sob story. Just poke the dangling wires some more and pretend I never said any of that. But I didn't bring you here for any of that.

I'm here to say goodbye.

Because time doesn't heal all wounds – pass me the helmet, the one with the... looks like a colander with cables coming out? Yeah, there we go – but time travel damn well might. Prevention versus cures, right?

So if you could go over there and hit that red button there? We'll never have met in the Royal Alexendria. Because I'll never have been there, because that night, that night decades ago, that car's never going to have flipped.

And I'll never have existed. Or, better yet, I'll have had a happy goddamn childhood.

Probably for the best, either way. I didn't have all that much longer anyway.

So just hit the button, and sixty years ago a circle never starts.

And if you miss me, and you damn well better or you were never a friend of mine anyway, just remember; Loss is a wound time's good at fixing.