“We only just met last night. Are you sure didn’t sneak over and see me watching that cartoon here when I was ten?” Daniel asked.

“Fair enough, we’ll do it again. This time, after twenty minutes of cards, tell me something that you’re absolutely positively certain will be impossible for me to have known by any means other than having learned it from your alternate future self,” said  Trudi.

It took two more rounds of twenty minute backjaunts, before he was throroughly convinced.

“Trudi, this is the discovery of all time!”

“So you see we could be a prep school boy and a teenager again.”

“But I’ll never know about it properly. You’ll go back 24 years, and I won’t know who you are. I’ll be happy to meet you and be friends, but I’ll forget everything after you’ve undone all my memories.”

“That’s what’s always happened before, but I had an hour to think of a solution to that in bed last night. I was taught this technique by someone when I was 24. First he did it himself. Then he taught me. But we never did it together at the same time. If I spend a few weeks teaching you – and I’ll have to call home and extend my holiday in this timeline to do it -, then we can time travel back simultaneously, together. We’d both concentrate on going back 25 years. Then we’ll arrive in a school holiday period when I only have to work on the TV show on Saturdays, and you’re here at your grandma’s.”

“I really do prefer that time period and the good times I had, but now I don’t know. Couldn’t we go back to when I was a teenager and you were divorced in your twenties?” he said.

“That’s a nice thing to say, but that era’s already been riddled with time travelling when I was in it,” said Trudi, “I shared this proposal with you, because ‘Reflections in Rainwater’ and the poem you showed me today have awakened such a strong desire in me to be a teenager again, and live in 69, that I’m even willing to put off re-meeting my boyfriend and having my son for decades in order to do it.”

“But I’ll just be a little boy to you back then,” said Daniel.

“Visually that’s true, but you’ll have all the poetic skills and thoughtful creativity that I saw last night,” said Trudi, “And if I stay in this time, as a mother in a long-term dating relationship, we can’t be together in any capacity.”

“It’s just that ... I can hardly picture you wanting to kiss a five year old kid, like the one in these photos,” he called back, darting into the bedroom and returning with an album of childhood photographs.

He turned the pages and showed her pictures of himself taken in the first ten years of his life. While she was looking at his childhood photographs, he was having a difficult time of not making it obvious that he enjoyed looking at her.