Writing Prompts: You wake up one morning as your 10 year old self. You try to explain to your mom that you are a successful adult, as she tries to get you ready for school.

 I discovered an old Reddit account I had for posting stories and writing prompts was somehow still active and decided to raid it for some of the older stuff I wrote while trying to get better at writing.  There isn't much but here is what there is...

 

Temporal displacement via avatar overlay is not a recommended version of time travel. Of course, since I was the first to travel in this manner and was completely ignorant of how it functioned that was unhelpful to me at the time. Accidental time travel; it’s a thing. Most people don’t know it’s possible and the powers that be are happier if it remains an unknown to prevent panic. Imagine if you could go to bed and wake up ten years old again? Or if walking out the door of a pub could land you in another continent before you left? Or if you went on vacation in France and discovered you had slipped through time to the days of the French Revolution?

I’d fantasized about time slips before. Most everyone I know has. You think about the age where everything was more or less okay for you and think about what changes could be made that would create the best outcome over time as the changes you made multiplied. The game was to think of the small changes and try to snowball it.

There’s even an entire genre of it on TV Tropes, called the Peggy Sue, for that movie "Peggy Sue Got Married" where it happens to the main character. Some of my favorite stories can be found in the trope, because let’s face it who hasn’t made a mistake they’d love to be able to correct? None of the stories I’d read ever talked about how groggy you are after the event. They never said how to deal with the head full of fuzz you get from the sudden displacement overlay. No, they all had author avatars who were able to brilliantly prove who they were and when they came from thanks to clever memorization of external facts like lottery numbers and memorization of minute factoids and assorted microevents.

Shit! Do you remember what you ate on the fifth Thursday in July twenty-eight years ago? I certainly didn’t! And to do it with a head full of cotton balls besides?

I felt like I’d lost well over half my IQ when I was awoken by the irritated voice of my mother for the second time to get up and get dressed for school. So much so at first I didn’t really remember that my Mom was dead and that the room I was in was definitely not the one I went to sleep in…

That thought was enough to cause me to sit up in bed abruptly. A mistake because now with all the grogginess I had already been dealing with I also had to deal with a sudden rush of blood to the head—it did not help. As I blinked my eyes to try and restore the vision that had been overshadowed by black spots I began to clumsily make my way to the edge of the bed. I couldn’t help but feel slightly punch drunk.

Pulling on the clothes sitting on the chair besides my bed I tried to pull together some coherence in thought but everything was still muddled. I estimated I must be about ten or eleven by the presence of the giant stuffed Pink Panther in the corner and the lack of Atari 2600 in the corner. That wasn’t something I got until Christmas or my birthday I wasn’t sure which at this point.

I walked down the steps and saw my Mom had on the coffee pot and had poured me a cup of coffee and placed the milk and a box of donuts on the table from the gas station. My brother and sister were already seated and eating. My brother looked at me solemnly and said ‘You’re late." My sister just babbled at me happily and kept squeezing the jelly out of her donut.

I couldn’t help myself. I ran over to my Mom and gave her a big hug. At this point it’d been three years since her death to me. Even if this was all just a dream I was determined to at least get a hug from her before I woke.

"Tough night, huh?" She said with a smile. Then she pointed to the table. "I’m happy to see you too, but you need to eat and get ready for school."

"I love you Mom!" I blubbered.

She didn’t think too much of it until she saw my eyes. Understand, I hated school at this age. I had nothing but trouble with fellow students and due to a disability and crippling ignorance on the part of both teachers and students went through each day in misery. Crying about having to go to school was nothing out of the ordinary.

"Kids I’m going to talk to your brother in the other room. Finish eating your breakfast." Mom said as she lead me slightly out of earshot to the living room around the corner from the kitchen.

"What’s wrong?" She asked me.

"I miss you so much." I said sobbing. "I know this is just a dream and I’m an adult but I still miss my Mom."

Mom looked at me confused. "You had a dream you were older?" She asked.

"Yeah, I’m older. I’m almost forty."

"Yeah, you’re an old man, I can tell." She said relieved looking since she knew she had a handle on things. Bad dreams were an area most mothers understood. And besides that the tearful mornings weren’t anything new at this point.

"I am. I have a car. I live in an apartment and go to work and everything." I said.

"Why don’t you tell me about it while you eat, huh?" Mom replied as she lead me back to the kitchen table and placed a maple frosted in front of me.

I sat down at the chair and suddenly felt hungrier than I could ever recall being. I quickly began eating.

My brother looked at me then at mom and asked if I was going to be okay in a faux whisper. She replied that I was fine, I’d just had a bad dream. My sister had finished squeezing the jelly out and eating it and was now banging the shell on her plate chanting ‘bad’ at it.

"It wasn’t a dream!" I interjected. "I was an old man when I went to bed and now I’m a little kid again."

Mom smiled and made eating motions.

I finished the donut in hand and reached for another one while drinking my coffee.

My little brother just curled his lips into a smirk. He clearly found the idea of me being old a funny image.

I tried again. "I had a car and a job and I lived in my own apartment."

"Oh yeah?" he shot back, "Who cooked for you if you lived in an apartment?"

"I cooked for myself." I replied.

"You’re not allowed to use the stove by yourself!" He returned triumphantly.

"I can too, because I’m an adult!" I rejoined. "That means I’m responsible for myself and I have to cook my own meals!"

"What kind of job did you have?" Mom wanted to know.

"I work with computers at an office building. It’s kind of boring though. I like my computers at home better because I can do whatever I want with them." I explained.

"You have computers at home too?" She asked amusement coloring her voice.

"Yeah, I plug my computer into my TV and watch movies on it." I told her.

"Oh?" She prompted. "Does that mean you have a lot of money?"

"No, not really. I don’t make more than ten dollars an hour. But it’s enough for me to pay the rent." I told her.

"Do you have a girlfriend?" She asked me next.

"I’m sort of seeing one girl, but we’re taking it slow." I explained.

She just giggled at that then noticed the time and told me to finish my coffee and go brush my teeth.

I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth, goggling at the sight of myself being so young again. I spent too much time staring at the mirror though because before I knew it my brother was opening the door and telling me we had to get to the bus stop. I told him go ahead without me.

I tried to talk to Mom, but she just handed me my winter coat and told me to get after my brother so I didn’t make him wait alone.

Why did I ever want to be younger again? No one ever believes a kid about anything!