Groundhog Pizza
Dining out on past and present lives
Writing this down to remember it. A conversation that began: “If you had the opportunity to go back and live your life again, would you take it?”
“Go back to being born?”
“No, to age sixteen, say. Your consciousness just goes back.”
“And you know what’s happened?”
“Oh, yeah. You’d wake up one morning, like that bloke who turns into a beetle*. Except that you’d have to go down to breakfast, or whatever, and be you as you were then. Because if you told them, they’d think you were nuts.”
[*Franz Kafka. Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa wakes to a problem.]
“You’d know everything that was going to happen. Oh, you’d know when everybody was going to die!”
“So you could intervene — ”
“But — yes, wait — but everything you did differently, the slightest thing, would change everything. So you wouldn’t have the same partner, children…”
“Bit if you didn’t do things differently, what about the partner and the children you might have had?”
“Oh, wow. Two sets of loyalties, and they’re mutually exclusive.”
“Yes, and what if this conversation happened in every life?”
“Ooh, spooky.”
“Every time, you get the chance to tell your friends that you’ve been here before…”
But that was when the food arrived. We were interrupted. Then we talked about something else.
One of these lives, I’ll tell them.
Sorry, clunky reconstructed dialogue. And that punchline came out of nowhere. What we really enjoyed about that conversation was the idea of having to replicate — exactly — everything about the first time round.
Even remembering what we’d all ordered, when it was being handed across the table, was quite a challenge.
Books exploring similar themes include Ken Grimwood’s Replay and Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (which, having thought of it, I’m going to read again). Also Stephen King’s 11/22/63.
As for films — did I mention the one with the groundhog in it?
Here’s a book for Gregor Samsa’s bedside TBR pile.
