The writing group was gathering, up on the balcony at Vintage, a Tuesday night regular meet-up, but this one, tonight's, was out of the ordinary. We drew three cards from the Where Should We Begin deck of story prompts: Something I want but haven't asked for; A time I wish I'd dealt with conflict differently; and The best prank I've ever pulled off.
Leading up to this week, I had a sense that the location and the weekly meet-up had a kind of gravity, a compelling reason to gather that I couldn't quite put my finger on, but somehow knew was important. Each week, the energy surrounding the creative writing group had grown, and tonight we caught a glimpse of where it was leading us. We had stumbled, or had been drawn into, a portal.
It sounds crazy, and it is. We were starting to see that things we had written as fiction were becoming real in subsequent days. Things we had written as historical context were becoming unreal, changing, like flickering gaslights. We had tapped into a way of jumping timelines.
Knowing this, not in the mind, but in the body, as a tingling sensation of possibility, we began to use our creativity to rewrite our pasts.
I thought about the prompt: a time I wished I'd dealt with conflict differently. After some pondering, I knew what I had to do, what I had to write, what I needed to get right with my former self. I wish I'd dealt with the inner conflict I'd carried since childhood, the conflict of lying to protect my stepfather.
He had started to spank me, to whip me for some transgression I don't even recall. What I do remember haunts me, and I usually repress it as a way of avoiding that inner conflict. I had been instructed to lie about the reason I needed stitches in my forehead. I had flinched, hit my head on the corner of my toy box, and started bleeding. Likely fearing accusations of child endangerment or physical abuse, I was told to say I had fallen from the monkey bars.
I remember testing out the lie on the playground, and one of the kids didn’t believe me. I insisted it was true, telling the story mostly to myself, avoiding it whenever possible, for my entire life. That inner conflict, where I deferred to bullshit instead of honesty, shaped my intimate relationships for more than forty years.
But writing it down, I could tell a different story. I am telling that story now. The best prank I've ever pulled off is happening in this very moment, as I rewrite my own past, making more informed choices, protecting myself instead of my so-called step-parent. After my mother and he separated, I never looked back until now.
He had died to me in the 1980s, but here in 2025 I brought him back from the dead, just long enough to let him take the burden from me. My timeline, past, present, future, began to align, and the scar on my forehead disappeared.
It's something I've always wanted but didn’t know how to ask for: to tell the truth about what happened to me, to understand it as physical abuse (even if accidental) but also as emotional abuse, selfish and intentional. It's not my fault. I don't even remember what I had done to "deserve" punishment, and I don't need to protect the reputation of an abuser. I will never have gone down that road again. I am free.
This is a work of organic fiction. Any resemblance to me or others is intentional, subconscious, fictionalized, or a combination of all three. I hope it resonates.