Chapter Two: Training Wheels and Time Bombs

                By the third week, I’d stopped trying to walk like a grown man and started shuffling like a toddler again. I had to. The cognitive dissonance was too much. Every time I stubbed my toe on the edge of the couch or tripped over my own feet, it felt like the universe reminding me I wasn’t in control—not anymore.

                But I had plans. Big ones.

                I knew what stocks to buy. What companies to bet on. What disasters to warn people about—if I could ever figure out how to speak like an adult without freaking everyone out.But those weren’t the things that haunted me the most.

                It was the people, the ones I’d lost. The ones who had hurt me. And the ones I still missed… even after everything. I found myself watching my dad through new eyes.
He was so young, so full of energy—not yet worn down by years of hard parenting, debt, two divorces, bad decisions, and my mother.

                My mother…

                She had become physically and verbally abusive toward the end of their marriage and only got worse after she won custody of me. There were things I’d blamed her for later in life. I hadn’t forgiven everything—but I understood more now. Age and knowledge had softened some of the sharp edges, even when part of me still wanted to cling to my anger.

                But they were still married now. The abuse hadn’t begun yet.
Maybe… maybe I could approach everything differently. I wasn’t a kid this time. Well—at least, not mentally.

One afternoon, I sat in a plastic chair in the backyard, pretending to play with a red dump truck, when it hit me like a lightning bolt:

                If I wanted to meet the people who mattered in my old life, I’d have to steer the world toward them… or steer myself. Could I still meet David, my best friend from high school?
He’d moved into my old neighborhood in 1996. But what if his parents took a different job this time? What if I didn’t go to the same school? Or worse—what if I did meet him again… and he wasn’t the same? Would I try to shape him? Turn him into the version I remembered? Would I even have the right? Was that even friendship anymore? I didn’t know.

                I’d never heard of anything like this happening before to anyone. As far as I knew, I was the first—maybe the only one. I still didn’t understand how or why this was happening to me.

                But I was also… depressed. I missed elements of my old life. I missed being an adult. I missed my adult friends, my adult freedoms and God did I miss technology.

                I had no idea how dating was going to work for me now. Then again, I had gone through my entire school career—elementary through high school—single. So maybe I wouldn’t try to change that part. All I knew was: I didn’t want to live forty more years just watching life happen.

                Not again. If I had to relive it all…I was going to make it count. Even if it meant going through braces again, puberty once more, even if it meant re-entering the chaos of adolescence with a mind that had already survived it once. Here I was: Reinserted back into my two-year-old body. Reliving it all—whether I wanted to or not.