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.
I recently got a notification I’ve been getting traffic on my blog, so let me bring it back to life! I’ve still be writing, working on a few projects, so here’s the first one.
This is a short story I started working on, inspired by a thought exercise I came across on Facebook. The question was:
“What would you do if you woke up tomorrow, and it was 1985—and all your memories of this time had been nothing but a dream?”
My first thought was, “I’d probably have some sort of existential crisis. I carry 42 years of life inside me, and if I suddenly woke up as a two-year-old again, I’d need some serious help readjusting.”
That led me down a rabbit hole: What if someone really did go to sleep one day, only to wake up in the body of their two-year-old self? What if they retained perfect recall—every detail, every mistake, every triumph from the life they’d already lived?
What would that even feel like? How would you handle it?
With those questions echoing in my head, I just started writing. I don’t know if anyone else will like it or not, but here it is—my story:
To Know You Twice.
To know you twice.
It was just a normal day when it all happened. I was 45 years old, had just gotten home from the gym, and spent some time playing one of my favorite video games—Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Part 2. It’s based on the original Final Fantasy VII, which first came out in 1997.
The remake felt deeply nostalgic. I’d heard plenty of people complain about how it diverges from the original—how much they hated that—but I found myself enjoying it. It wasn’t just replaying a familiar game; it was like discovering a whole new story hidden inside an old favorite.
I remember falling asleep watching Netflix, and when I woke up, I screamed.
Not because I was in pain—though my joints ached in ways I didn’t understand—but because the room was all wrong. The bed was different. And above me was the underside of a bunk bed, the kind my older brother used to sleep in when we were kids.
The ceiling was textured, stuccoed like popcorn, with a brass light fixture I hadn’t seen in decades. The room felt off—filled with toys I didn’t recognize, plastic shapes dangling from the ceiling, spinning lazily in the warm sunlight coming through a window that didn’t belong to my current apartment.
The silence was thick in that way only the past can be. No buzz of cell phones. No hum of air purifiers. Just the distant sound of someone humming and the sharp scent of baby powder.
I tried to sit up, and that’s when I realized:
My arms were short.
My fingers were pudgy.
And when I cried out in panic—because I did cry—it came out as a high-pitched, breathy wail.
I scrambled off the bed, heart pounding, but my coordination was a mess. My brain fired commands with the precision of a soldier—but my toddler limbs flailed like I was drunk.
Then the door creaked open, and a voice I hadn’t heard in over twenty years called out.
“Sweetie? You’re up early!”
My mom.
Not the hollow, weathered woman who passed away seven years ago, her eyes tired and her smile gone. This was her—young, full of energy, smiling in a faded Care Bears t-shirt.
She stepped into the room and scooped me up like I weighed nothing.
I—forty-five-year-old me, trapped inside a two-year-old body—stared at her like I’d seen a ghost. Because I had.
None of this was right. Nothing made sense. I still remembered my life. No, not just remembered—I could see it. Every detail. Every sound. Every moment. Crystal clear.
I’ve always had a decent memory, but this was something else. This wasn’t normal recall—it was like I had developed photographic memory overnight. Not just a sharper mind, but perfect memory. Like hyperthymesia or whatever Sheldon Cooper had in The Big Bang Theory.
Chapter 1: The First Week Was Hell
I could barely speak. It was like my brain hadn’t adjusted to my new body—or maybe my vocal cords just weren’t ready. I couldn’t walk straight either, even as my mind screamed at my legs to stop wobbling. I’d wake up crying from vivid dreams—paying bills, heartbreak, losing jobs, making love, burying friends. And every morning, I’d wake in this impossibly small body, feeling hopeless, with no clue how to escape it—or if escape was even possible.
It took a full day to accept this wasn’t just some ultra-realistic dream. I was two years old again and the year was 1985.
It’d be decades before smartphones, the internet, or streaming. I had no idea if things were truly happening again—or if I could change anything at all.
Could I heal? Could I avoid the traumas I’d already lived through once? Was this a second chance… or was I dead, reliving my memories?
But no. That couldn’t be right.
Because the moment I woke in my two-year-old body, I had already made changes—small ones, granted, but real. I was talking. Or at least, trying to. Whenever I attempted to speak like my adult self, it came out as high-pitched babble.
I began using the toilet on my own, astonishing my parents. They gushed over the fact I no longer needed a diaper, like I had magically potty-trained myself overnight. It was… embarrassing. I knew how to drive and do my own taxes, and yet here I was, being celebrated for pooping in a little plastic chair. I recognized how absurd it all was—but I also understood: this was the body of a toddler, and I had to work within its limits.
I got frustrated constantly. My fingers wouldn’t cooperate. My balance was a joke. But my mind—my mind was sharper than it had ever been. Not only had I retained every memory, it was as if my brain had been tuned to a higher frequency. I remembered everything with terrifying clarity. And I had no idea how my parents would react if they discovered their toddler could read at a college level… or solve long division in his head. I wrestled constantly with whether or not to reveal how much I knew. Would anyone believe me? Would they think I was a prodigy—or worse, possessed?
And if someone did believe me…Would they keep my secret? Or would I be exposed?
Would I be taken away—tested, scanned, poked, locked in some sterile room while scientists tried to figure out how I worked? So, I stayed quiet, watching, thinking and Playing the part for now. Because I remembered everything.
From Turtle Mania to the Challenger explosion. From Y2K and 9/11 to the rise of smartphones and the COVID pandemic. The sting of betrayal. The warmth of forgiveness. The thrill of redemption.
I remembered all of it, every moment, every lesson. Every second chance. At first, I thought maybe it was a test. A second chance, divine reset. But then a darker thought crept in: What if I lost it all again? Would I still meet the people who made me… me? Would I screw it up? Some, I wouldn’t mind never meeting again. Others—I would miss dearly. Then there was my ex, Connie.
Would I see her again? Would she want to see me again? For me, she had always been the one who got away. We had a stupid argument and broke up when I was 40. It was one of those fights where, if we’d both just stopped being so damn stubborn, I truly believe we could have made it work. But that one, stupid fight… it ended everything. Still, I wondered: Would fate cross our paths again? Would she love me if she met me now—like this?
Could I stop the pain I knew was coming… without screwing up the joy that came after? If I tried to steer events away from tragedy, would anything that followed still be real? Could I rewalk the same path? Would I even want to? Would it be fake… or wrong? Was I just a ghost of the man I used to be, wandering through a childhood I’d already survived once?
I had over four decades of knowledge, instinct, pain, and perspective in my head. But I still had to drink from a sippy cup and I still had to take naps—where I wouldn’t sleep, just lie there quietly, thinking.
J Cooper 