Timeline Traveler

Sometimes my mind wanders

to different timelines.

I'm seven again.

I'm trying to help with the dishes again.

But this time,

when a plate I set ontop of the stack in the cupboard

makes a tiny clank,

I don't get screamed at

and berated.

I don't get told how terrible I am,

how I can't do anything right.

Instead,

my mother smiles at me

and tells me I'm doing a great job putting the dishes away

and that she appreciates how helpful I enjoy being,

but to be careful not to put the dishes down so haphazardly,

the way children often do,

or else I might accidentally break one

and then I'd have to help clean up that, too.

This is the timeline where I am my own parent though.

Nothing as gentle as that ever happened to seven year old me.

I put myself in the role of caregiver for my younger self,

a therapeutic, life saving, mind changing role play.

This reality saves me.

It helps build me strong and full of love

and confidence and curiosity

and all the things she wanted to beat out of me.

Sometimes I wonder if I had to die to experience all these imagined realities.

I wonder if maybe I'm not some sort of zombie version of me.

Or perhaps I've just been rebirthed,

washed clean in the ever changing timelines in my mind that never actually happened,

finally escaping the mental chains she placed on me

that I reinforced daily.