He picked his time and went. It wasn’t what you’d expect to be chosen for a trip back in time. They were quite expensive. For a man like him, it was a life savings and then some.
As he was prepared for the temporal chamber, fitted with electrodes, shaved, sanitized, and given the series of injections required, his memory played vividly.
He remembered his mother.
He remembered her doing exercises in the living room. How peculiar they seemed to the eyes of a small child. The routines varied over the years. There was yoga and musical aerobics. He remembered those, most. From time to time, the routines would find renewed vigor, increasing in frequency.
He remembered not understanding why foods would suddenly become plentiful in the house. Rice cakes and grapefruits. Celery and cottage cheese.
It’s funny how we learn more and memories become a greater understanding of ourselves and loved ones.
His mother had never been a thin woman, not in his memory, but he’d always thought her beautiful. That she struggled to become thinner was beyond his notice as a child. She was just his beautiful Mom who happened to do strange things and eat strange foods.
It wasn’t until he was older that he realized what her purpose had been. Much later than that, before he found out that his father had been cheating on her and had, regularly, for several years. He didn’t have the foggiest clue that his mother was chasing diet after diet and trying every new exercise fad under the sun, because she thought her weight made her unattractive. She thought that if she lost weight, her husband would want her more and other women, less.
Her body had other ideas, though. Nothing seemed to work for her.
The technicians went through the instructions for the hundredth time. He initialed documents and said yes at the right times. One was saying, “Now you understand that you will not be physically transported, you will be inside a former version of yourself. This will be a sleeping version of yourself, so you will experience some disorientation as your brain chemistry corrects itself. The shortest ever trip was one minute. The longest was ten minutes. Most are about three”.
He knew it all and was only listening enough to keep the process moving.
Memories, even simple ones, can be significant. One of his fondest memories of his mother was when he was about four years old, in bed for the night. She’d come into the room to check on him as he lay there with his eyes open, not ready to sleep just yet. She didn’t say a word, but gave him a soft smile. She reached her hand down and stroked his hair away from his face. He just looked at her, his eyes getting heavier. He’d never, in he rest of his life, known such warm security, such a feeling that all was right with the world.
The chamber was completely dark. The intercom buzzed, “are you ready?”. Not wanting to have to repeat it, he shouted “Yes, I’m ready!”. There was a loud noise, somewhere.
And he was back, in his room, 6 years old. The house was quiet, his sister was sleeping. He knew his father wasn’t home, yet, though he should have been. The sleep haze wore off quickly. He looked down at his tiny body and his footed pajamas in disbelief. The shortest trip was one minute, he didn’t have a second to lose.
If you try to alter your past events, instead of just reliving them, you could be ripped apart, atom by atom, a casualty of the time stream. He’d been aware of the risks when he planned this trip.
He slipped out of bed and padded, softly down the hall to his parents room, knowing what he’d find, there. His mother, asleep, alone on the bed. Seeing that she’d cried herself to sleep, it was all he could do not to be overcome with wracking sobs at the sight of her, but he had come here for a reason, his purpose fierce in his mind.
He walked to the edge of the bed and looked at her. His living mind was older than the woman in front of him. He reached his hand out, ever so gently and started stroking the hair away from her face. Her features, still holding traces of anguish, began to smooth. His vision was a watery blur as he whispered to her, “you are beautiful. You are perfectly beautiful just the way you are. You’re a good and lovely woman and nothing will ever change that. There isn’t a single thing wrong with you. Nothing at all. You are and will forever be beautiful”. He stroked her hair, saying those things and things like them. When the expanding lump in his throat and overflowing eyes conspired to rob him of his voice, he pushed through, straining, making the words come out. He’d traveled too far to be thwarted by tears.
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I’ve been wanting to write something, to share my personal experiences, to show the impact that body image has had on my life and my loved ones; but It’s too personal, it affects me too strongly on an emotional level. After experiencing this frustration for months, my mind finally found a way around that issue, to some degree, in the form of this story.
– This is such a unique and touching story. Such a beautiful way of exploring and showing what body positivity means to you, and how it has impacted your life. Thank you so much for sharing it here. So sweet. Xoxo
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