Win free money!

I have to gift cards to give away. The first one happens today. Enter by Midnight tonight, 2/26! I’ll be choosing my favorite answer. Here’s the question, if you could travel back in time in your lifetime, when would you go and why?

This winner gets an Amazon gift card for $13.10 (from you all using links on this page to buy stuff on Amazon–it’s rewards for you time!)

And now, go! (enter on my LJ or my website blog. Either is fine)

7 Comments

  • Ken

    I’d go back to late summer 1987. Scant weeks since I’d turned seventeen and mere days before my “Lucky” rabbit’s foot—bestowed upon me by friends on my High School Varsity Swim Team for breaking, not one, but two, different parts of the same foot within an eight week period—disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

    On that day, I was standing on my friend’s driveway. Ok, I was actually straddling my twelve speed bike, which was primarily how I got around back then.

    It wasn’t a planned trip. We had both been out riding and, when we ran into each other (figuratively speaking) at the corner of Seven Mile and Wakenden, we just picked a direction and kept going.

    I loved riding my bike back then, but it can sometimes be a lonely pastime, so I was glad for the company. Eventually, several hours (and god know how many miles) later, we ended up there on the driveway just as the sun was beginning to set. It had been a good day. I was pleasantly tired and we’d gone all over the place, talking about everything and nothing.

    That’s the “When” of it. I’d go back to that textbook late-summer evening—not that I believe in any way that you can capture the magic of either Youth or Summer in something like a textbook.

    When I got there, just as I was about to head home and my friend was about to go inside for dinner, I would walk up to my younger self and very quietly, but also very firmly, say:

    “Ask her out, you complete idiot.”

    The “Why” of it should be self-evident.

  • Roseaponi

    Once, when I was about 9 maybe?, my former best friend and my brother’s former friend teamed up, asked me to come play, and then picked up sticks to beat me with. (Fortunately I made it back within view of my house before they hit me more than a couple times) I’d have appreciated adult me walking up right then to tell them off, and possibly grab them by the ears and drag them up their mamas and tell them off too. I’d have made very sure that young me understood that there was nothing wrong with her that made her a target. 

    (sorry – hope the rest are a bit happier!)

  • Donald (Sagablessed on MW)

    When and why, you asked.
    I would go back to when I was six. After their divorce, my dad came everyday to a park down the street and he and I would do things: go fishing, hiking, watch movies. Then one day, on sixth birthday, he was not there. I have never seen his since. I recently learned he passed away last year. I would go back and ask “Why did you stop?” Then I would tell him about my life and ask, “Are you proud of me?”
    Depressing, I know. But you asked.

  • L.S. Taylor

    I would go back in time to when I was seven. I’d sit with my cat Fuji and give him bellyrubs and lots of pettins. He vanished like most of our cats do, in the woods behind my parents’ house, but he was my first and will always hold a special place in my heart.

    If he’s too busy, though, I’ll just go to when I was twenty and pet Sparkle, the friendliest cat we ever had and an absolute sweetheart.

  • RK

    Twenty-eight years isn’t a long time in the grand scheme of a human lifespan, but it’s long enough to wrack up my share of pivotal moments, times I regret, or that changed the course of my life for reasons I didn’t see until much later. Some of those things, I still don’t see the reason for, but maybe it wasn’t my lesson that I was a part of presenting. There are several things I sometimes wish I could do differently, could take my time over, could even just stop and fix them in my mind more firmly to remember, but one date stands out in my mind above all the others.

    If I could travel back in time, I would go to the sixth of January, 2007, the day I married my husband of six years. Not to change anything, but to do it all over again, because that was the day and the moment when I was blissfully, unquestionably happy, and from that moment has so much of my happiness since then sprung. I wouldn’t change anything about my life, even if there are some things I’d prefer to skip over. Everything that’s happened, good and bad, has made me the person I am, and I like that person. But when it comes to my husband, my family? When it comes down to that pivotal moment when I said “I do”?

    I would do it all again.

  • Bethany C.

    I would go back to when I was 17, right before my grandfather died. I would spend way more time with him, instead of being a selfish teenager with stupid priorities. I’d also tell my 16 year old self not to bring that bottle of whatever it was and polish it off at that party because uuuggggggghhhh. To be clear about that, throwing up is gross and doesn’t feel good.

  • Adrianne

    I’d go back to the year I graduated from college and teach myself how to take care of myself. Not knowing how to eat and protect myself from chemicals has caused a lifetime of crippling pain.

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