I stumbled into a time machine recently – no, it wasn’t a magical hot tub, nor was it something out of HG Wells. It wasn’t even a fourth dimension wormhole. My time machine was a red folder, the color softened with age, the edges frayed. It was stuffed with pages and pages of my past – short stories, novel excerpts, personal essays and tiny scraps of paper, scribbled notes from which I hoped fully formed work would spring. The folder had been sitting in a tote bag in the cubby of my desk, ignored since my mother had handed it to me a few months earlier when cleaning out her basement. I knew that once I started looking through it, I would be tempted to linger for hours, probing for treasure, so I set it aside and quite frankly forgot about it.
When I found it again, I decided to just take a quick glance – but, it sucked me in. Page after page illustrated that I was (as my friend, Scott, put it after I sent him an excerpt of the novel I was writing in college) “a funny chick.” In my last blog post, I wrote that I was lost in my twenties, but most of these pages (written between the ages of 21 years and 25 years) proved that I was anything but. Finding them seemed like a gift – a chance to travel back in time and relive the passion, the dreams, the innocence and even the self knowledge that it would all end soon enough, that I was on the cusp of adulthood and I better enjoy my free youth while I could.
This is an excerpt of that novel (sorry – can’t post the funny one, this is a family friendly blog!) – this scene takes place on the last night before graduation:
“…As I float off, I let my mind wander through the last four years, a journey seen through the haze of impending sleep, but with the startling clarity of thoughts poised on the brink of a new beginning.
What have I learned? What do I leave this whole experience with? With Jake breathing softly next to me and the perfume of a May night swirling through the room, filling my sleepy senses, I realize that we make our own lighthouses, those small moments when you can see the whole world around you and you realize right then that you are exactly where you want to be.”
Yes, melodramatic – I was 22 years old, after all. But although it was fiction, my protagonist, Sam, felt what I felt. Lighthouses were a big theme – here’s another excerpt, same theme:
“As I sit here by myself, listening to the rain beat down on the roof, I realize that I’ve taken that leap across the shimmering water to the lighthouse in my mind. I’ve reached it and I’ll reach it again. As long as there are crisp cellophane wrapped roses to open and breath in, with sweet cards attached, as long as there are babies to hold, smelling of Desitin and baby lotion, as long as Jake loves me, whether from far away or close by, as long as I do what I want and love with my heart and soul, as long as I let the everyday occurrences warm me and the special moments surprise and enchant me, I’ll keep reaching that place. Because we make our own lighthouses, those small moments when you can see the whole world around you and you realize right then, you are exactly where you want to be.”
That boasts perhaps the longest run on sentence around, but you get the point. I think this was an alternate ending – one I wrote a year or two after the first. It surprised me, because I didn’t remember being that hopeful. I remembered feeling adrift, missing my boyfriend and feeling caught between youth and adulthood, trying to decide if I should move out of my parents house or not. It was so very odd revisiting this moment – yes, it’s fiction, but it was inspired by a moment in my life when I was 23 years old.
Traveling back to the eighties, even if just in my mind, seemed particularly ironic (and bittersweet) just a few days later, when my father suffered a stroke and lost a chunk of his memory. His brain spun back and planted him firmly in his life twenty five years earlier. At one point, he got out of bed in the hospital, tubes and all, because he had to “get to work at the factory.” That factory, of which he was the manager, closed in the 1980s. But, that’s where he landed – and I started to think, if I had to relive any moment in my life, which would it be? Yes, the stroke was horrible and scary and you never, ever want it to happen, but he didn’t seem unhappy at first, just confused, even though the rest of us were torn apart and devastated. Thankfully, though his short term memory is still iffy, he is back in 2010 with us and will hopefully continue to improve. But, I can’t help but wonder what sparked landing there? Was that a happy time and in order to cope with the trauma, his brain let him relive it?
Sometimes, I wish I could hop in a time machine and travel back to when my kids were babies – I know in my previous essay, I mentioned how completely crazy and stressed I was as a new mom, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there were moments of great joy, as well. Moments of pure bliss. My boys didn’t talk back to me. They loved me now matter what – I couldn’t screw up. Now, “I hate you,” is a really close second to “I love you.” I know it’s just part of growing up – asserting independence – and more often than not I get a heartfelt apology. But, it still stings.
Other times I think that if I could relive anything, it would be college – a moment in time when anything was possible and the future stretched out in front of me. A time when my personality was untouched by work stress, then parenting, then just the daily grind of keeping a household up and running – I was a combination of badass and sweet (a description that I found in a creased and faded letter). I don’t know if it’s possible to be that combination on the other side of forty, or even thirty, or if I’d even want to be. It’s one thing to be a badass when you have no one relying on you, except perhaps a boyfriend, quite another when you have three children, two dogs and a husband. If I ever do find a way to fit into a wormhole or if I stumble upon a magical hot tub, it’s very likely that I’d decide to just stay put. As tempting as it is to imagine flying free, I think I’d be content with just visiting my past lives on the papers stuffed in that faded red folder.
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