"There's a world of difference between truth and facts. Facts can obscure the truth." -Maya Angelou

Every now and then, I find myself completely enveloped by my bedtime reading. There's something about getting lost in a world that isn't your own. In a world that is more suspense-filled than the familiar tri-tone of a newly received text message. A few weeks ago, I started reading The Time Traveler's Wife. A book about a man whose escapist tendencies force him out of the present and into his past or present, the narrative has afforded me with shocking parallels to the current state of my own life.

Last Monday, I attended a second and final court hearing for a case against the suspect who mugged me this past May. Having arrived at the courthouse early, I fished my book out of my bag and sat down on a couch in a Victim Services lounge to escape into a more desirable, albeit fiction, situation. Around 10 AM, I was asked to enter the court room which comprised of twelve jurors, a judge, the prosecutor, a police woman, the public defender, and the suspect. I walked in clutching my book in one hand, quickly peeking to see what page I was on. This will all be over soon. My heart raced as I walked up to the stand.

For those of you who have read or watched it, I'm at the part of the story where Henry is trying in vain to find a doctor that will believe that he is suffering from a sort of chrono-disease. As in, a disease in which he literally disappears from the present and finds himself at a different point in time. He typically time travels when he finds himself in stressful situations. Not surprisingly, it takes him years to find a doctor that will believe him. 

I testified from around 10 AM to 3 PM, with a lunch break. During that time, and during the entirety of this case for that matter, the lawyers continually urged me to find solace in that fact that the emotional difficulty was worth it -- it was all in pursuit of "the truth."

On March 11, 1996, at 32 years old, Henry first meets Dr. Kendrick, the doctor who will eventually diagnose his condition. "'I have a condition which I'm told will become known as Chrono-Impairment. I have difficulty staying in the present.' 'I'm sorry?' 'I time travel. Involuntarily.' Kendrick is flustered, but subdues it. [. . .] 'I've never heard of this disease. I can't do anything for you.' 'You don't believe me.' 'Right. I don't.'" As a last resort, Henry leaves a prescient note with Dr. Kendrick, asking him to open it a month later, after the birth of his son. It's his only way of proving the "truth," that he has seen the future. The note predicts the exact date, time, and name of the doctor's to-be born son, along with another unfortunate fact. Despite the accuracy of the note (as validated by the birth of his son a month later), Dr. Kendrick is still reluctant to believe Henry. It's only when Dr. Kendrick observes Henry spontaneously combust from the present as he crosses the street that he realizes that what Henry has told him is in fact true. 

As part of the trial, the public defender decided to perform a sort of psychological experiment on me. I had explained that the actual mugging took approximately five to ten seconds, that is, for the girl to grab my wrist, hit my head, snatch my phone, and run away. "I want you to imagine exactly what happened. And I'm going to time it." My heart began to race. My lips quivered. Oh no. No. Not now. I told myself. "Do you understand the exercise?" Oh God. Here it comes. My attempts to remain composed were completely thwarted. I broke down crying. The judge excused the jury for a few minutes, while the prosecutor brought me water. Much to my dismay, we continued the "experiment" once I was done crying. It was determined that my recollection of the events was timed at 6.4 seconds, which shockingly, is a more precise version of the "five to ten seconds" which I reported. 

This and several other pieces of my five-hour experience (listening to the call I made to the police, hearing a public defender select and incorrectly paraphrase sentences from my blog) left me with a plethora of questions: How did my consistent responses to different variations of the same question get us closer to the truth? How could people, other humans, so nonchalantly prod at my tender wound? And finally, given that the suspect was simultaneously being tried for drug charges, why was my "truth" so hard to believe? 

I found out Thursday that in the case of stealing my cell phone, the girl was acquitted in a mistrial -- the jury was unable to come to a unanimous decision one way or another. Since then, I've found myself questioning this notion of truth. How could the pursuit of something so pure and noble leave me feeling so violated and unjustified? 

This morning, I was riding home from a soccer game with a teammate. "I think I'm just naive," I admitted to him. "I don't understand what more could have pointed people towards the truth. And the public defender? He found whatever he could in order to twist my truth into his own." My teammate was silent for a moment. "You're not naive," he diagnosed. "They're just cynical. Truth in their business is just whatever will help them win their case. Haven't you heard of the copy machine experiment?" Oh but of course. 

In the 70's and 80's, Ellen Langer conducted a series of experiments known as "The Copy Machine." Through her research, which showed that people are equally likely (>90% of the time) to allow someone to cut in front of them in line at the copy machine when they had an excuse like "I'm in a rush," and "I have to make copies," she concluded that people are rather mindless in their everyday behavior. My teammate's point was that "the truth" in the context of this courtroom was the mindless reason. And an unarguable one. Performing a painful psychological experiment in pursuit of the truth suddenly made the performance of a painful psychological experiment unquestionably okay. 

When I learned of the premise of the Time Traveler's Wife, I briefly considered how interesting it might be to time travel through your own life. Peeking at your future and getting new perspective on your past. But as I've read further, and more importantly, relived a "6.4-second" traumatic experience continually for the past three months, I'm seeing that there is some undeniable beauty in continuously moving forward in our lives. To live in the moment, soaking in the good and wringing out the bad, as we go along. There's little benefit in escaping to or from, or getting hung up in, any point in time. 

With this trial having come to a close, I am left with nothing but my truth. At some level, it's unsettling to note that something as unmistakable as the truth is, in the end, so ambiguous. But at another level, there's some odd strength in knowing that, in each case of our lives, in each circumstance, we are the sole beholders of our own truth. And we have the ultimate power to do whatever we want with it.