While I was reading Blue Thread, I couldn’t help but think of the fact that there are so many films, television series, and books all about time travel and the consequences or effects of time travel. Why is that? There’s the appeal that we can go back to glamorous times and explore history, but is there more to it?

Is it because we all have a need to go fix a mistake in the past? Some people want to go back to take back that one regret, that one final argument that changed everything, or that time they walked away from the person they were supposed to end up with. People never sit up late at night thinking of all the choices they have made that they are proud of. No, we stay awake and obsess over the regrets. We think over and over again, what if?

What if I had never said that? What if I said that? What if I had taken that chance? What if I quit my job? What if I moved to a different city? You just experienced the worst breakup ever and do not know how to move on with your life? That’s okay. All you have to do is go back in time and never date that person—problem solved. If you want to make sure you are choosing the right major in college, you can simply jump ahead to your future and check things out.

With time travel, it is possible to go back to all our mistakes, our regrets, our missed chances, and fix them. We could erase the what-ifs from our lives. We could choose the perfect path we want to take. We could make mistakes and then take them back. With time travel we could live our perfect fairy-tale lives and never have to live with the heavy weight of regret, the shadow of guilt, or the shame and pain that come with some memories.

But these are all the obvious attractions to the idea of going back in time to fix a mistake or jumping ahead to see if our futures worked out the way we planned. We all like to imagine we are important, that we are relevant or connected to something meaningful. But through time we realize that though we may not recognize it, there are so many people feeling the same emotions and thinking the same thoughts as we are. Time travel is part of that in storytelling.

We all feel the clock ticking, our time running out. If we can travel in time, there is an illusion that we are somehow expanding our time or that we have control over time, something that in the end controls us all.

Through a magical object, a writer can show the feeling of being trapped between worlds or show a comparison. Blue Thread shows that through its main character, Miriam. Miriam feels trapped in the world she is in, but through travelling in time realizes that people have been struggling with the same issue for years, and in her world she fights to change that. Time travel is the gateway that Miriam uses to discover her strength and find her importance, but she is given that gateway because she is special. And that is what we all want: to be special and have that unlimited time that is offered by time traveling.