Kindred

“I felt as though I could have lifted my other hand and touched him. I felt as though I had another hand. I tried again to look, and this time he let me. Somehow, I had to see to be able to accept what I knew was so.”

This takes place after the events of the novel have traumatized Dana and left her mentally and physically scarred. Like the ghost of her arm that wants to touch Kevin here, she has also become a ghost of the past. She made an imprint on history but was never officially there according to historical records.

“Maybe I’m just like the victim of robbery or rape or something—a victim who survives, but who doesn’t feel safe any more […] I don’t have a name for the thing that happened to me, but I don’t feel safe any more.”

The first time she time travels, Dana tries to explain what happened in more realistic terms. Trauma like robbery and rape is real, and it points to the possibility of survival. Because Dana is a writer, she thinks linguistically. Thus, she laments that she cannot find the appropriate words because this makes the experience less real as well.

“As real as the whole episode was, as real as I know it was, it’s beginning to recede from me somehow. It’s becoming like something I saw on television or read about—like something I got second hand.”

Here, Dana begins to juggle reality and fiction. She wants to let herself think of her experience as something distant that happened to someone else because her fear of it happening again is more real. This moment is also a meta-signal to the reader, as we are in fact reading Dana’s story secondhand.