Roller Coaster

I went to bed last night thinking about my life. For an instant, I wished I could go back in time to when I was 18 and start over again completely. I thought about all of the things I would do differently if I had the opportunity: go away for college after finishing BCC instead of staying here (I wasn't hoping to go all the way back to 16, but if I were to redo life that far back, I'd have not done early admissions so that I'd never have gone to BCC in the first place), move away from Florida before starting a career, have a different career completely. I wondered what my life would be like now if I had done those things, and I wished that there were some way that I could.

And then I panicked.

I panicked because I started thinking about movies. I thought about movies like Peggy Sue Got Married and the one with Nicolas Cage and Tea Leone--I think it's called Family Man. In both cases, the main characters somehow find themselves in alternate realities either reliving their lives or living their current lives in different ways. Besides those two specific movies, I thought of how many other movies have the same type of premise, and then I thought to myself: What if there were really some way that this sort of thing could happen?

And that's when the panic set in.

Of course I knew that it was completely illogical, but it was late at night, and I was lying in the dark alone in bed after having been lying down alone for a couple of hours, and I thought to myself, If all of these movies share a similar premise, they must be based on something, right? And strange, unexplainable things do happen in this world all the time. What if I wake up tomorrow and I really am young?

And panic ensued.

Starting over again is something I've imagined so many times, as I'm sure others have, so you'd think I'd be excited about the prospect--at least I'd think I would--but when, for just a few seconds I thought it could actually happen, excitement was the furthest thing I felt. All I could think of was Griffin and Keifer and how much I love them and how devastated I'd be if they weren't in my life. I tried telling  myself that if I went back to 18 there was a chance that I wouldn't remember any of my future, and in that case, I wouldn't even know that they had ever existed, and, in turn, wouldn't miss them at all, but that logic failed to calm me down. Even with the possibility of ignorance coupled with the possibility of a brand new life lived the way I've often wished I had lived it, I felt panic at the thought of a life without Griffin and Keifer in it.

Even though we don't always get along--or in the case of Keifer and me, almost never get along--I have to say, my love for my kids is incomparable to anything else I've felt in my life, so much so, that for them, I wouldn't change a thing. Until last night, in the skewed reality that darkness brings (okay, with the addition of part of a novella by Stephen King), that's something I didn't really understand.

Today, I do.