Which author would you love to have dinner with?
My five-year old self.
She is quite the author and very creative with her story-telling.
She’s quite chatty, too.
*
I’d like to tell her not to wait to write everyday. That she can be “an author” at any age.
I’d explain that she could do anything.
Say anything.
Be anything she could imagine.
She exists in every life she could ever live.
*
We’d probably eat chicken nuggets with sweet and sour sauce and use our t-shirt as a napkin.
She’d probably attempt another try at scientifically mixing Kool-aid with dish soap.
We’d accidentally take a swig from the science cup, then remember which one of the fluids was not a self-washing mouth mixture.
We’d laugh about that.
*
I’d ask her why she is so scared to say “No” to people.
She’d tell me it’s because saying no feels like taking a huge risk of rejection, even being hit or spanked.
She’d share her feelings of pain, loss of connection with herself, and both a sad and happy familial form of love.
*
For her… and I… love comes in waves.
*
We’d cry about that.
Only until we laughed about the absurdity of lost love through waves of self-doubt.
*
Perhaps we’d chat about “losing love” and how it may not be possible.
That love remains love if it’s real love.
That “burning bridges” may not be possible when that lovely bridge didn’t exist in the first place.
That perhaps she was actually shouting from a slippery slope without a bridge to the other side where no one was there or listening.
*
Life was all in her imagination.
No bridges ever existed,
nor were ever
really there.
*
She still shouts at me about bridges though.
She really does.
She says “no!” inside to burnt bridges.
We secretly hate bridges.
*
I hear her cries and listen.
Sometimes she is right.
Sometimes she just needs me to listen to her vulnerable shouts and the why’s. The reasons she feels the way she does.
*
Is it nurture or nature?
I don’t often know.
Neither does she.
I genuinely try not to call her “wrong” anymore.
She’s actually quite wise.
I listen.
*
I write down her words.
Here.
She may be writing to you even now.
I don’t actually know which age writes to everyone, yet no one.
*
Between her five-year old age and my 46th year of life, her wisdom seems to be quite on point.
Sometimes I try to nudge her into trying new things.
She’s quite stubborn.
She says “no” often.
To me especially.
I listen.
*
I do “it” anyway.
She gets mad.
So do I.
*
A mini-internal tantrum ensues.
*
She also tells a lot of jokes about Sasquatch hunting and her mystical farts in a yoga studio during shavasana.
She’s hilarious.
*
Knowing her… listening to her, asking her questions… Changes all of me.
Every age.
*
Somehow, I am transformed by these conversations with my mystical farter.
“Me.”
*
Sometimes I realize that quantum physics may be real.
Sometimes I wonder whether my five-year-old has her own theory of quantum mechanics.
*
Quantum physics explains that every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once.
That an infinite number of divergent parallel universes exist.
That every moment of our lives, we may enter a new universe.
That we are here and also not here.
That we may step back at any moment and see the universe for what it is, which is also a step forward.
*
That she has no idea what quantum mechanics or superposition is, nor how to spell it.
Neither did I.
Neither do I.
*
Perhaps no bridges exist, and except in our minds.
Maybe there is no burning or mystical inflamed bushes either.
Except, maybe,
where we toot.
*
Drinking the Kool-aid with dish soap is a treasured memory.
It was worth a gulp.
At least once.
*
“Amor Fati” – Everything unfolds as it should.
*
Plant seeds with intention, trust the soil and sun.
*
Discover the difference between effortless action and exhausting struggle.
*
All that… makes sense. Now.
The struggle is still real,
Yet it’s also… not.
*
It’s weird,
perhaps.
*
Still, she speaks without using big words like quantum superposition.
I listen.
*
We learn how to soell.
Wait… cancel that.
We both have no idea how to spell. Sometimes.
We’re also quite dyslexic and push the wrong dang buttons.
Often.
*
Mystically fart though?
That, we do.
*
Hunting cryptids?
We do that, too.
*
Two ages,
yet one
Spirit.
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It’s fiction.
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But is it?
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Idk.
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