“Well you have a good relationship now, and had a bad relationship from 18-20, and then you were probably grieving a divorce. It would have been nice to have known you back in the happiest times of your childhood from age 15-17, if only I hadn’t had the mind of a little kid. If you’d seen me back then, I was typically running around the garden and climbing trees with a towel safety pinned to my shirt, pretending it was a super hero’s cape,” said Daniel.

“I used to know someone else who was addicted to cartoon super heroes when he was that age,” said Trudi, recalling one of her bedtime discussions with 14 year old Murray, “It’s not something that needs an apologetic explanation. I’ll come over at around ten in the morning and see you. I should be getting to bed now, but I’ll leave you with a potential inspiration for a new poem. Maybe you could write about what it would be like to be 5 to 7 years old again, but with the mind that you have now.”

“That IS an idea. Thank you,” said Daniel.

“Until the morning then,” said Trudi.

She made her way back to the village hotel, and lay in bed with a mixture of thoughts. One the one hand, she could return home to the California Hills in a week or so and see her boyfriend and son again. On the other hand, she could time travel back to her mid teens, after teaching Daniel how to time travel back with her at the same time. Then she could spend every school holiday period with a part time next to next door neighbour she’d never known in the first timeline. She would be able to relive her adolesence with the nearby friendship of a boy ten years younger than her, who had the time travelled mind and memory of a 29 year old accomplished and talented poet. She could let her two year marriage play out the same way, with her memory still intact. Knowing what was coming, she would not be shocked or hurt by her brief husband’s abandonment when the time came. With her memories of his future, she had a distinct advantage over him. She had two questions to consider:

Firstly, was she really prepared to start a new timeline that excluded not only her final consumption of Murray but also their many interactions in the months leading up to it? She thought about that one and decided that, since she would remember the earlier timelines, it would not matter to her that they no longer happened.

The second question on her mind concerned the matter of waiting from age 15 to age 31 before she could see her current boyfriend again, and even longer before she could even see her son born again.

She’d relived a nine year period after waiting nine years before time travelling back from age 33 to eventually undo one of her earlier planned temporary consumptions of Murray.