Sometimes I think we’re irreparably woven into the fabric of time—as if time isn’t as linear as it seems but rather layered, with countless convolutions intersecting, tangled together in a vast yarn. A thread impresses itself upon other threads, leaving traces as you navigate through your life. An act in the present, or even the future, can leave its fibers on moments in the past.

When I was a kid, I remember having this terrible ear pain. At the time, I couldn’t quite understand it—I didn’t yet have the faculty to think about what it was. But I remember the pain searing through my days and nights. One night, I was crying so hard that my parents took me to a local doctor with a clinic—an ENT specialist, probably (though I still have my doubts). He took a pair of pincers to pull out the earwax. I had never screamed as hard as I did while he was doing it; it was so painful that my father asked him to stop. We went home that night, still in pain, but the next day, we went to a physician at the Air Force station who prescribed ear drops. Surprisingly, when I used them, the pain was gone almost instantly.

Cut to the present: I have a constant ringing in my ear and occasional pain from the surgery. It almost feels as if these issues left a trace in the past—that the kid I was, who had no idea what the future held, somehow got a hint of it.

When I look at photos from my past, I notice that my left eye always seemed a bit more dilated than the right. Cut to now, and it’s due to surgery. It’s as if my past self somehow knew that this fate was waiting.

Similarly, when I was ten, I had a small bulge on my hand. The doctor suggested removing it, but we were scared and decided not to. To my surprise, it went away within a few weeks. It’s almost as if the universe realized it was giving me this burden too soon and decided to delay it for a later juncture in my timeline.

Maybe I’m reading too much into the lines, as is my habit, but it certainly makes me wonder about time and the way it threads through this yarn, weaving all these moments together. When such trivial things from the past emerge, you realize that somewhere there must be intersections causing it.

So many good things have happened too, and I wonder if all the good I have in my life today might have been foreseen as well.