If you could relive one day from your past, which would it be? It's the sort of question that turns up at a dinner table after the second bottle, and everyone answers it the same way. The wedding. The birth. The goal, the graduation, the one good holiday.
I think those are the wrong answers. Not wrong as in dishonest, but wrong as in wasted.
Here's the argument. Milestones are already looked after. You have photographs of them. You've told the story so often it's been sanded smooth. Other people were there and keep reminding you. A day like that survives in memory in a more or less intact form, because everybody involved has been maintaining it for years.
Ordinary days have no maintenance crew. Nobody photographs a Tuesday. Nobody retells it. A day when the kitchen was warm, someone was still around, and the biggest decision was what to have for dinner: that day goes into the bin without anyone noticing. It isn't remembered badly. It isn't remembered at all.
And that, I'd suggest, is the real shape of the longing. We don't miss events. We miss texture. The voice in the next room. The pace of a day before you knew how it would end. Memory is a terrible archivist: it keeps the headline, discards the detail, and then lets you believe you've kept the lot.
So the sharper version of the question is this. Which day do you have the least left of, and would most like back? Not the best day. The most lost one.
There's a catch, naturally, and it's the one every time-travel story eventually trips over. What are the rules? If you can only watch, the day is a gift, and you'd spend it paying attention in a way you never did the first time. If you can interfere, the day is a trap. You'd be tempted to say the thing you didn't say, warn someone, fix something, and now you're not reliving a day at all, you're editing it. The more you touch, the less you recognise.
I'd take the watching version every time. It's the one that sends you back to the present a bit more awake, and that's the only honest use of nostalgia I can think of.
A novel about this
I wrote a book about a man who gets this offer in a rather unglamorous way. Time, For a Change is set in West Clare, where Terry Ward is a project manager running on caffeine, sarcasm and a deepening loathing of corporate life. When he finally clears out his late father's workshop, he finds a mysterious wooden box with a spinning brass cone and four labelled controls.
Touch the pads, and Terry doesn't see the past the way a photograph shows it. He's in it: childhood rooms, the smell of a pipe, a workshop in full swing. Whether it's memory, time travel or something stranger is a question the book is in no hurry to answer.
It's a time travel romcom, with a good deal of grief, a worse job, and a love story arriving from an unexpected direction.
So: if you could relive one day, skip the wedding. Go and find the Tuesday.
FAQ
If you could relive one day of your life, which would you choose?
Most people reach for a milestone: a wedding, a birth, a win. The more interesting answer is an ordinary day with someone who is no longer around. Milestones are already well preserved by photos and retelling. The ordinary days are the ones that vanish.
Why do we want to relive a day from the past?
Because memory keeps the headline and throws away the detail. We remember that a day happened, but not the sound of a room, the way someone laughed, or what was on the table. Reliving a day is really a wish to get the detail back.
Would reliving a day change anything?
That depends on the rules you invent. If you can only watch, the day becomes a gift. If you can interfere, it becomes a trap, because everything you touch might ripple forward. Most good stories about this idea spend their time on exactly that question.
Is wanting to relive the past unhealthy?
Not in itself. It becomes a problem when the past stops being a place you visit and turns into somewhere you hide. The useful version of the wish is the one that sends you back to the present paying closer attention.
Is there a novel where someone gets to revisit moments from their own past?
Time, For a Change is built on it. Terry Ward, a burned-out project manager in West Clare, clears out his late father's workshop and finds a wooden box that throws him into vivid experiences of his own past. It is a time travel romcom with a lot more feeling in it than the premise suggests.