[Motorboat Cruiser]

He felt an elbow not so gently nudge his ribcage.

“Wake up, sleepyhead! You’re going to miss your stop.”

Eyes still closed, Michael wondered, “How does that little girl know which stop is mine?”

He opened his eyes, looked around, closed them, rubbed them, and opened them again.

“What the…???”

A chill moved swiftly through Michael and it wasn’t air-conditioning induced.

He tried his best to cope with the sensory overload he was experiencing. For one thing, he was wearing a jacket, which came in handy because the bus windows were streaked with raindrops. Breaking his stare at the wet glass, he looked towards the little girl and noticed that it wasn’t the same little girl from before. No, this girl he knew. They had lived on the same street and grown up together. He looked back out the window and realized that this was the street they were now traveling down, its edges lined with oak trees, their leaves yellow and orange. A rainy autumn day in Long Island, circa: who the hell knows.

As the bus came to a stop, the little girl, Kelley, grabbed her backpack and said “C’mon Michael, you want to stay on the bus or something?”

To be honest, Michael wasn’t sure what he should do. Still, he got up and walked to the front, exiting the school bus. Everywhere he looked, a flood of memories washed upon him, far more captivating than the cold rain that battered his face.

“See you tomorrow”, Kelley said as she turned and walked the opposite direction of Michael’s boyhood home.

“Uh, yeah, see you tomorrow”, Michael said, having no idea if it were true or not.

He slowly walked down the street, seeing the front doors of houses he had gone trick or treating to many years ago. He walked past the pine tree filled patch of woods that had once housed a mighty tree fort. He wondered if the fort was still there. He hadn’t the courage to go to his home just yet. He had some thinking to do. Walking into the woods, he spotted the fort and climbed the makeshift ladder. Pulling himself inside the shelter, he found himself hyperventilating, not from the climb, but from the events that had transpired in the last ten minutes.

“Surely, this is a dream”, Michael told himself. But, try as he might, he couldn’t wake himself from it. He reached into his pocket for the incense but it wasn’t there. “Rainstorm”, he remembered, “How odd”. Instead, he found a packet of baseball cards. Reaching into his watch pocket, he felt the lottery ticket. “Finally”, he thought, “a link to reality”. But again he was mistaken. Having replaced the lottery ticket was a slip of paper with two words and a four-digit number printed on it.

ANOTHER CHANCE - 1988

The implications hit him like a truck. If it was really 1988, he was 13 years old. Another chance at life, without all of the costly errors he had been responsible for. Another chance at being a kid, and this time, appreciating every moment. Another chance at love, this time without the insecurity of not knowing himself, without the insecurity of being rejected.

ANOTHER CHANCE

What if he actually had the chance to live his life all over again, yet this time around with every ounce of experience already gained? What might he do differently?

Assuming that he was, in fact, not dreaming, he realized that he was about to embark upon a journey of circumstances, in which, unlike before, he could now control. The thought was pleasing. Still, for all intensive purposes, he was a 35 year old in a child’s body. Folks were going to get mighty suspicious if they knew that he could fill out an income tax form or pass a driving test. He was going to need to utilize every acting skill he had ever learned to pull this role off. He was also going to need to exercise extreme caution. One slip and he would be branded a freak, a heretic. They would burn him at the stake.

He tried putting himself into the role, that of his former self. He was certain, for example, that at his age, his mother would be worried if he were to come home late without calling. “Oh my god!” he suddenly realized. He was going to see his mother, the woman whose funeral he had attended almost 5 years ago. Maybe this time he could get her to see a doctor sooner. Maybe they would catch the cancer before it metastasized throughout her body. Maybe she would grow old with him this time around.

He thought of all the good he could do in this rerun of a life. The lives he could save, the lives he could change. Of course, all of his thoughts weren’t quite so altruistic. Thinking back to life in 1988, he wondered if he could raise enough money in time to bet on the Dodgers before the World Series began. He wondered what Microsoft stock was selling for. He wondered if he would ever need to hold a real job.

He was reborn for all practical purposes. A new chance at life had risen from the ashes of his former self and he was ready to soar. He climbed down the tree and walked out of the woods, heading towards his mothers loving arms and a home-cooked meal, neither of which he would ever take for granted again.