We were talking in a room not much bigger than my Grandma’s living room, but with far more kitch. Coffee houses were like that anymore; social media versions of a cozy nook where you could slide in and do your daily business with a hot cup of brown water and sugar buzzing with caffeine. Ella sat across from me wearing the fraying black stockings I hate beneath a jean skirt and a shoulder less yellow top that made her light brown skin look like it glowed.
She said, “what would you do if you could go back?”
“Depends on how far. Depends on what I could change in the past. It isn’t as simple as you see on the shows, you know.”
Her lips turned up slightly the way they always did when she was feeling wry. “I don’t know. Neither do they. For the sake of conversation, lets say you go back as far as you want, but you’re in the body you had at that time with the mental capacity you had at that time.”
An interesting distinction. Did that mean that if I went back to being a baby I’d lose all memory of my life after? How would that moment feel? How would it feel to be blissfully unaware of the world around me and its coming troubles? I said, “In that case, I would be twelve.”
“I would be fifteen,” she said without hesitation. The silence that followed challenged each of us to follow up with the obvious ‘why’ but neither of us did. I didn’t meet her until she was nineteen and me twenty three. So many of my experiences had already gathered themselves into a life by the time I met her.
Some Thouughts:
- Ran out of time…