Social Regret and Time
In the book The Time Traveler's Wife, I find it interesting that things happen once and only once. This is not a story where Henry is responsible for preventing 9/11. It's a love story. It's one love story, the love story, the way that it happened. 200 pages in, Henry doesn't go back in time and change how he and Clare met: that event happened already, and now, how it happened cannot be changed. Time, in The Time Traveler's Wife, is permanent.
I think about it so often: What would I do if I could go back to my youngest years, and redo everything, knowing all that I know now?
Instead of spending so many years in the closet and miserable about it, could I have just come out way earlier, and actually just been a cool as heck bi trans girl zoophile all along? Could I have skipped the embarrassing parts of my zoo journey, where I pretended to be anti zoo to fit in with other furries, even while I was simultaneously in deeply romantic, and, yes, sexually active, relationships with dogs? Could I have gone through school and actually enjoyed it, rather than feeling like I was just holding my breath so no predators could detect my true self for eight hours a day?
Or, was all of that kind of necessary? Was it actually a really crucial survival mechanism, to hide these things that others would not have accepted back in the place and time when I went to school? Could my life have actually been way, way worse?
It's not lost on me that in this version of things, the version of reality that we're already living in right now, I still have all of my fingers and toes. I'm still alive. Hell, I'm incredibly happy with all of the zooey work I get to do, the interpersonal relationships I've had and continue to have, the ways that I've been able to help out and spread the fires of fun and love that the spirit of zoosexuality has to offer in abundance.
So often, I look back in time and wish. I wish I had been less shy, and had actually taken music classes growing up, so that I had more literacy in music. I wish a departed loved one who would have been my biggest ally could have ever gotten the chance to see the trans me. I don't regret a lot with the relationships I've had with dogs: some moments I wish I could have done better, but, by and large, if those are the love stories, the ways that they happened, once and only once, I am very happy to be the dog wife that I was to them, and for these to have been our stories.
And I'm unbelievably lucky for that. That whatever was going on with all of this human stuff, I still always had the privileged ability to keep the dogs' wellbeing first and foremost. I know some people were dealt worse hands.
Time, in our world, is permanent, as far as I know. As much as I daydream, high school already happened. Departed loved ones are no longer thinking of me, at least, not as far as my own religious beliefs go; But I am often thinking of them, they still shape me, so many of the gifts that I can give to others now are actually secretly vicarious hand-me-downs from some really cool two-leggers and canids.
My body cannot go back in time, but it must go forward in time.
The past is permanent, and, we can take things from it: lessons, stories, tricks, skills, jokes, tattoos, scars, memories, so on. The future, we will now get to write, as best as we can.
Article written by Eggshell Ghosthearth (October 2025)
Find her at https://tothineownselfbezoo.com/
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