Ever since I was a young girl, I’ve always read stories of adventurous men who discovered amazing places, people and new technologies. The one in particular which enchanted me the most was the Time Machine. This beautiful and impossible technology allows people to travel in time and space, whenever and wherever they want. A TV series I love to watch which deals with this amazing technology is Doctor Who: the protagonist is the Doctor, a time traveller who moves around through time and space with a TARDIS. This name means “Time And Relative Dimension In Space”: thanks to it, he can visit any place at any time. Every time I watch an episode of Doctor Who, I travel with him and visit new, fantastic places which seem impossible even to imagine. And I often ask myself: if I had a time machine, like the Doctor’s, where would I like to go? The answer is not easy… I’d like to see how the world will be in a hundred or maybe in a thousand years, but I’d also like to discover the secrets of Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece. You know, travelling in space and time is not easy, and thanks to Doctor Who I learned that those kinds of adventures involve strict rules: for instance, if you travel in the past you MUST NOT interfere with any event, important or not, because the result of your action could change the whole history as you have always known it! And if you travel in the future, it would be better not to bring anything home with you as a souvenir, because the discovery of objects of the future could shock people or drive them crazy!

Despite all these rules, if I had a time machine I think I surely wouldn’t make a journey in the future. I don’t want to know how the future is before its time, and I don’t want to know MY future at all! If I saw my future, I would live in a constant fear. I don’t know how to explain it clearly, but I certainly know that many futures exist and not only one, so even a simple and insignificant action could change an entire life. That’s why I don’t want to know my future: I want to live my life day after day, and let my decisions build my own future, and not a stupid “spoiler”!

I’d prefer to travel in the past instead. As I said before, it would be interesting for me to live with the Ancient Egyptians and discover the secret of the pyramids, but I’ve already some requests: I’d like to go to the past, to the childhood of my father. He has always told me beautiful stories about his youth, his friends and his jokes at school, and I wish I was born in the same year as him in order to live these experiences with him! Moreover, I’m really curious to see the village of his birth, Rossiglione, in the 70s. It’s not a big city, but it’s the place where my father lived his first years of life and had some of his funniest experiences. I still go there in summer because my grandparents have a house there, and every time I go there with my dad he always tells me all his memories about that place, and I always envy him not to have lived at that time. I think we would have been great friends. But I think that I have the greatest honour: I am his daughter!

Another place I’d like to visit in the past is simply my city but in 1995, the year of birth of my boyfriend’s birth. I’m really attached to him and his family, and every time I see an old photograph of him when he was one or two years old, I wish I could squash his fluffy cheeks and his fat little feet and admire his beautiful green eyes and curly, blonde hair! I’d like to do the same with myself but, as I learned in Doctor Who, the contact with a younger myself of the past would create a paradox which would cause several problems. I’d really love to embrace the little version of myself and play with her also because I’m the only person on Earth who can totally understand her… but if time-traveling has its rules, it’s right to respect them.

As you can see, I have no special requests for my travel through space and time. My desires are simple and humble, but they make me really happy. Of course there are plenty of places and past events I’d like to live, but in the end, I think that the best thing is to live in the present. As Doctor Who says: “This is who I am, right here, right now, all right? All that counts is here and now, and this is me!”.