Once there was a boy who lived his life in both directions at once. One of his selves came into being at the moment of his birth and travelled through life in the normal direction, watching the boy's body age and his mind develop from infanthood through the phases of childhood and onwards into the increasingly vague distinctions of adulthood and old age, and finally ceasing to be at the moment of death, the sunlit bedroom's four walls opening into infinity. The other self came into being at that same moment of death and travelled backwards through the boy's life, observing the processes of his life moving in reverse - his heart beating resolutely as blood was pumped into it by the body's veins and arteries, the gradual stripping away of memory and experience and the freshening of the senses until there was nothing in the earliest moments of life except an oceanic and peaceful awareness devoid of data or concepts of any kind; then infinity once again.
From the perspective of the first self, that travelled from birth to death, every moment of the boy's life was determined by what had come before. Every event and memory in the past had shaped the present moment into what it was and determined perfectly the direction of the future, which although unknown and sometimes fearful could be moulded like clay, desired and imagined goals being brought into being by the boy's conscious actions and decisions. There was nothing to fear in the past; it lay silently in the boy's memory like water in a still pool, untouchable; safe and familiar as old photographs in an album. Death, the unknown, was a source of both fear and excitement, the ultimate fascination that haunted this self's steps in every moment.
From the perspective of the second self, that travelled from death to birth, the future, being known absolutely, was the attractor of every action of the boy's life, drawing each experience and decision out of the past in the only way possible to insure the occurrence of the already written future. All of the boy's actions seemed as predetermined as the actions of an actor on a stage, performing his part in a play that has been performed hundreds of times already, to a compassionate and responsive audience. There was no need to worry about the future, which was as safe and set in stone as the first self's past was: even the moment of death itself had been nothing to fear, because the only thing that had happened was that the second self had come into being. Life for this self, therefore, was a beautiful funfair ride, in which the light grew gradually brighter; knowledge and stress disappeared slowly; old acquaintances were met and over time became strangers; more and more was forgotten and the spaces in the mind grew larger and larger; everything familiar became unfamiliar; nothing could be done except to watch the beauty grow and experience the amazing dissolution of birth, the only source of fascination and fear - because before birth, what could there be?
As both of these selves travelled in their respective directions through the boy's life, they necessarily met and melted together in every moment, in the endless instant of the present. The boy, of course, knew nothing about all of this, and only existed in that endless instant. Past and future were unreal to him, and time was only a measure of the distance between two unknowable points, so the boy's most frequent feeling was a combination of mild confusion and wonder - and love, the merging of opposites, twin souls seeking union in him through all life and time.