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Time Travel



You are staring up at me. You are making tea, talking on the phone to your boyfriend at the time, you have been crying. Your mom took this photo. You are staring at her.

It was the night before you left for France and for the adventure of a lifetime.

You are afraid. You are excited. You really cannot believe this dream is coming true. You are so beautiful.

September 18th, 1997, you walked off the plane at Gatwick Airport. You would not know for many years that you christened this day auspicious as you walked down the quiet terminal, peering out of the window to see your first glimpses of London. It could be that this date was auspicious for you for many years previously. You were born two weeks early (according to your mother, and she should know). Maybe this was the day you were really supposed to be born? 

Yet, instead you were reborn at twenty years old in Gatwick Airport totally alone in the world and on your first - and maybe last adventure of your life. 

It is morning and you have 24 hours before you will board a train to Rome, and then off to France - your childhood dram come true. Famished for adventure, you struggle with your suitcase through Victoria Station and somehow find the hostel you booked. Rather than nap, you have a list of things to do: buy a pair of Dock Martens in London, see Princess Diana's tributes (She had died just days before you arrived), and go to a show in London Theatre District.

In your rush to get to the adventure, you forgot your camera. 

There is a black box drawn on the page of Volume 1. to represent the photos you did not take. 

Two years from this date you will be married - and you will think your world is ending - and just beginning. It will be glorious and terrible and you will need you from this moment to remind you who you are when no one else is looking. 

My therapist informed me some years ago that she thought this date held special, perhaps ominous meaning for me. I stared at her. It seemed like a weird thing to believe at the time.

Yes, I got married and then divorced 16 years later on September 16/18 (it is complicated to fully explain. There is a Leap Year in there and that sort of threw things off a bit. The wedding, the blessing, and the divorce got a little muddy in there - all the 16 or 18). I had a root canal on the 16th the year after my divorce, last year I had surgery on a broken femur on September 16, and this year that date was particularly hard as well. I am not ready to talk about it, but the coincidence is not lost on me. I am pretty sure I am forgetting other terrible things that have happened to me on that date. Don't worry, I wrote them down for future me. But, apparently, I also went to London on this day and was reborn. So, I guess the day is not all bad.

Back to my therapist, she said it was an auspicious date. I told her I wasn't sure I believed in such things. I am here today to announce I have seen the light and converted to this idea. Now that I am in my Crone Era, I can believe in auspicious dates and fairies and woodland creatures. I am also experimenting with a Voodoo doll.

January 20th is another day I am not super keen on. 

Now, I sit looking back on you as you set out on this adventure. For so many years I let you sleep. I needed you to sleep because I could not face you and tell you all the ways I failed you. Today, I have opened the book to wake you, remember you, and to take you back to France. 

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