You wouldn’t forget things. You wouldn’t lose things or people—that alone is enough for most folks. You would never have that gut-wrenching realization when you wake up in the morning of Oh My God he is really dead, having been blessed with a certain forgetting in your sleep. You would never know what “remembering” feels like, that feeling of a limb gone suddenly missing, without warning. You would never forget that book you stayed up to read three nights in a row, only to realize six months later that you don’t remember a single detail of it.

You would have an escape when all you wanted to do was close your eyes and slip into time and be part of the fabric of its wings. It would be like you finally knew what it meant to get somewhere.

My own time travel machine is a subtle bubble, fragile as a bird. When you climb inside, it takes you back to before you were born even, back to when you were just a thought that hadn’t been thought yet.

It takes you back to moments of your life, like the summer you spent in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania for a poetry fellowship at Bucknell University, when you read poems in a beautiful old church and ran naked through a football field at night with a bunch of other young “fellows.” Back to when you ran through cemeteries and green, green grass. It was July and humid and greener than you’d ever known green to be, and you ran because that was all you could do. It takes you back to these moments that, when you were in them the first time, you thought you were unhappy, but upon revisiting them again in your time machine, you realize that you could have never been unhappy running through green like that. How could you have been?

Unhappiness was invented along with the time machine, and it is a matter of belief when it comes to being able to enter either.

Upon revisiting moments in your time machine, you will realize that it was always better than it seemed, that you were never fat, and that you could write your tail off. This is a perk of being a time traveler.

When you close the door to the hatch and tell it to go back to 1983, you can see your father carving sticks in the backyard at a wooden picnic table and the plastic on the chairs in the kitchen and how they stick to people’s thighs in the summer.

You can take back all the things you ever said. You can un-say them. That is another perk of being a time traveler.

For example, if the last thing you ever said to your father was “I hate you” before he died, well, you can undo that. You just set the dial back a little farther, and then get out and plant your feet firmly on the brown carpet, your hands on either side of the doorjamb, and remain silent. Or, say I love you. Really, the choice is yours. Another huge perk of time travel.

You can go back to before you found out your baby was dying and either decide to not have a baby at all or to just go back to when he wasn’t so sick. To stay in the moment when he had a light in his eyes and could still move his body. Maybe you’d just stay there. You could, you know, with your time travel machine.

Any event that occurs in the universe has to involve both space and time. Gravity doesn’t just pull on space; it also pulls on time.

When we time travel, we actually bend gravity so we become light, sinewy things that don’t know what it means to be held down and that fly through space and back into the arms of people we thought we’d lost and grandparents we never even met. We can bend and alter and climb the walls of time, which is a huge perk of time travel.

There are also things to take into consideration, like getting stuck in a moment of time. Say you go back to that May in 1983 and decide you want to stay. Fine. You have that choice. You do. But remember, when you go back, you are also still here. Your body is still sitting on the train reading a book, is still doing a backbend, is still having dinner with your husband. Only part of you will be missing. Part of you will be stuck in 1983 eating pizza with your father as you drink wine with your husband. Your eyes will reflect this missing-ness. There will be an emptiness behind your eyes that, over time, will turn into a deadening.

Although you have mastered time travel, you cannot master being in two places at once. So really you must decide if the perks are great enough.

How badly you want to be there? How badly you want to be here?

Jennifer Pastiloff was recently featured on Good Morning America. She is a yoga teacher, writer, and advocate for children with special needs based in L.A. She is also the creator of Manifestation Yoga® and leads retreats and workshops all over the world. Jennifer is currently writing a book and has a popular daily blog called Manifestation Station. Find her on Facebook and Twitter and take one of her yoga classes online at Yogis Anonymous.

Jen will be leading a Manifestation Yoga® weekend retreat at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in the Berkshires, Massachusetts Feb 1-3, 2013.

*Photo by fruity monkey.