I rolled over in bed,and immediately knew something was different.
Not different in the way that usually greeted me in the morning. The dull ache in my left knee from that skiing accident in my thirties, the persistent throb in my right shoulder that my doctor called “normal for your age” as if that made it acceptable. Those familiar complaints were simply... gone.
I lay still, taking inventory. No stiffness in my lower back. No creak in my hip when I shifted. My body felt light, buoyant, like I’d shed thirty pounds overnight. Like I’d shed twentyyears.
I opened my eyes.
The ceiling was different. This one had a popcorn texture with a water stain in the corner shaped vaguely like Florida. Wait a minute, I knew that water stain. I’d spent countless mornings lying in bed staring at it, avoiding my life.
Thirteen days.
The voice from the dream—was it a dream?—echoed through my mind. Low and warm, with an edge of something ancient underneath.
The forgetting will be gradual. And it will be complete.
There will be a cost. There is always a cost.
I sat up too fast, heart hammering, and looked around the room. My room. My old room, in the Jamaica Plain apartment I’d shared with Diane, with the secondhand dresser, the typewriter on the desk, and that poster of The Smiths I’d thought was so sophisticated. Books everywhere—stacked on the nightstand, piled in the corner, threatening to avalanche off the tiny bookshelf I’d rescued from a curb in Somerville.
This was impossible. This was?—
What had I done?
The panic hit like a wave. I had a life. A good life. A huge promotion I’d just earned, a condo I loved, Emma was going to Harvard in the fall, Sarah’s laugh over wine on Friday nights. I had built something real and solid andmine, and now?—
Now I was sitting in a twin bed in 1987, and the voice had said thirteen days, and I had apparently traded everything I’d spent decades building for awhat if.
Who does that? Who gives up a perfectly good life for a question that can’t be answered?
Apparently, I did. At fifty years old, I’d finally lost my mind.
I pushed back the covers, a quilt my grandmother had made, I’d forgotten about this quilt, and swung my legs over the side of the bed. My feet hit the cold hardwood floor and I stood, expecting the usual symphony of protests from joints that complained.
Nothing. Not even a twinge.
The full-length mirror on the back of my closet door showed me what I already knew but couldn’t quite believe. Twenty-three years old. Chestnut hair falling past my shoulders in thelayered mess I’d thought was fashionable. Green eyes without the reading glasses I’d needed since forty-two. Skin smooth and unlined, the kind I’d have paid thousands for in 2014.
“Maggie!” Diane’s voice echoed down the hall, muffled by the bathroom door. “Hurry up! You know Valerie always hogs the mirror!”
Valerie. The aerobics instructor at the Y who spent twenty minutes after every class examining her pores. I’d forgotten about Valerie.
I’d forgotten so many things.
And the things I did remember were strange—blurred, approximate, like recalling a movie I’d watched half-asleep. I remembered the shape of those twenty-seven years but not the details. Outcomes without the middles that got me there. I knew Jack had gotten a job at theNew York Times—sometime, eventually—but I couldn’t have told you the year. I knew I’d walked away from him, that our ending had been my fault, but the specific words, the rest of it? Gone. Smoothed over by decades of not letting myself think about it.
Apparently my brain had decided to time-travel with the emotional highlights reel and leave the footnotes behind. Typical.
“Coming!” My voice sounded strange—younger, clearer, without the slight rasp that had crept in somewhere around age forty-five.
The bathroom was exactly as I remembered. Cramped, perpetually damp, and absolutely saturated with the smell of Aqua Net and the cheap floral perfume Diane bought by the gallon. Every surface held some beauty product or another. Hot rollers on the counter, makeup scattered across the tiny shelf above the toilet, three different cans of mousse competing for space near the sink.
I turned on the shower, no tankless water heater here, just a temperamental beast that required precise negotiation, and waited for steam to fog the mirror before I stripped off my oversized t-shirt.
The shower felt different in this body. The hot water hit skin that wasn’t tired, muscles that weren’t sore, a frame that moved with the unconscious ease of youth. I’d forgotten what it felt like to simplyexistwithout a constant background hum of minor discomforts.
Afterward, wrapped in a towel that had seen better days, I wiped the steam from the mirror and stared.
No crow’s feet. No laugh lines. No subtle loosening of the skin along my jaw that I’d pretended not to notice for the past five years. Just... a face. A young face.Myface, before life had written its story all over it.
