Rosalia’s Visit

(Approximate story word count: 1500 words. Estimated reading time: 15 minutes.)

Summer storms often had a pleasing beauty to them. The intense heat being replaced with a vicious downpour of rain, sometimes joined by bursts of thunder and lightning. On one such night, a lightning bolt hit the ground outside of a rural home, with a figure appearing within the impact zone.

“Alright…”, she said, brushing herself down gently as she sought shelter from the rain inside the porch of the house, “…time travel actually does work”.

The girl was tall, standing at a lofty six foot, and was elevated even further through a pair of three-inch heeled boots. These lead into a pair of tight, defining, black leather leggings, accompanied by a purple and black plaid pleated skirt. She wore a simple and sleeveless black lace top which was covered up via a purple zip-up hoodie, long blonde hair cascading gently over the hood.

“Feels weird coming back here like this,” she said as she rummaged in her pockets, producing a set of keys. She flipped past the various keychains and tools she kept on them until finally reaching a short key, placing it into the lock and turning it. With a noticeable “ka-chunk”, the lock turned, and the door opened.

“Even across time these still work, hopefully the noise dampener field is working okay.”

She entered the house and closed the door behind her, making sure that all the locks were back into place. Peering into the kitchen she saw two dogs sleeping either side of the dining table, both huddled into soft beds.

“Back when they slept through the night… how things changed as time went on.”

She walked up the stairs, taking in her surroundings as she turned around the corners before reaching the landing. Pausing, she waited and listened closely. The sound of snores affirmed that everyone was indeed asleep, from the room on the far left to the room on the far right.

There were some mumblings from the room in the middle, which the girl entered into, closing the door behind her.

“Been a while, hasn’t it?”

The room itself was incredibly messy. Clothes, books, games, and all sorts were strewn across the floor in seemingly random locations, storage boxes being used as just general gathering areas for items rather than ways to organise things.

“Being upfront this doesn’t change later on, we’re getting better at it for sure but there is definitely a lot of messiness still present.”

The girl found a spot to perch herself on the bed and sat down, looking across the sleeping figure with a slight smile on her face. She reached into her hoodie pocket to pull out a small notebook, flipping through it to find what she wanted to say.

“If my notes are correct, and they… usually aren’t but we’ll ignore that for now, I should have ended up in twenty-sixteen, just as you’ve finished up sixth form.”

Leaning forward from her perch on the bed, the girl looked closely at the hair of the sleeping figure, taking into account its length.

“Yup, twenty-sixteen, I’d recognise that egg haircut in progress easily.”

The girl read closely into her notebook, furrowing her brows and looking at what is to come in the timeline.

“So, you screw your A-Levels up pretty badly, but you do get into university all the same. Not going right away obviously because of your gap year, which does give you some pretty good experiences all the same in working with students, though you are kept idle a lot of the time otherwise.”

She flicked through the pages a bit more, mumbling about inactivity, not a lot happening, various other events of the year before reaching the pages marked “2017” and gasping loudly.

“Aha! This is where things definitely pick up. You get in good with a monthly group meetup, playing board and card games, chatting with people about all sorts of topics, and making several really good friends along the way. These events actually serve as a lynchpin for a lot of things coming up.”

The next page was brought up, causing the girl to sigh in disappointment before laughing in joy.

“So two major events come up later on this year. You start university which is… I’ll get onto that later, cause it contains a lot. But you also cosplay as a girl for the first time a month later, which awakens a whole lot of things, including the fact you are actually a girl, and a very pretty one at that.”

She sighed once more, before going to read more pages.

“But unfortunately you don’t really act on this for a while, you keep it bottled up a bit more. Even after a lot of people realised it about you, you kept the real you hidden away a bit longer. Not to mention the general life difficulties you encounter in university…”

The girl paused, thumbing the notebook gently, biting her lip, very much not wanting to speak on this topic.

“University… I’ll keep it brief. You aren’t cut out for academic life, as much as it would have been difficult, you could have found a job and tried to make your own way. You had some programming acumen to begin with, but you kept trying to be something you were not.”

A longer pause filled the air.

“And you destroyed a few good things getting to that finish line. Doing serious damage to personal relationships that you stayed in denial of for the longest time, holding onto some semblance of what a “friendship” was without realising what was actually going on. You grow out of being that person, but remembering the way you were never gets easy.”

Pages turned back, and were held on for a moment, thinking about what could have been, until the girl flicked through some more pages.

“You stayed that way for a while yet, until you got both therapy and a stable job. Having something to give your day a schedule and talking through what issues you were facing with someone professional genuinely helped, to the point you were able to stop taking antidepressants!”

The next few pages were turned to and studied carefully, more meaningful events being revealed.

“Your newly found income opened up a lot of options, especially in pursuing trans healthcare. Later on in the year you got both a psychology appointment and a hormone appointment booked for within a month of each other. Waiting on the NHS was no longer needed, you could take the steps to become the best version of you right away.”

The girl looked down at herself, appreciating her own appearance with a euphoric smile, realising how much life the figure had ahead of them.

“Speaking of steps to becoming your best self, remember those nerds you met back in early twenty-eighteen? Yeah, you choose to move in with one of them in a town you love, and it goes pretty well. Some rough moments here and there but you’re able to live your truth independent of those around you, which I have to say, even now, feels fantastic.”

A page was turned before it was flipped back a few times, an important point having been glossed over.

“Right, yeah, your job was fantastic, and you could have kept at it a while longer. But you yearned for more, both financially and personally. Change is scary, your whole life is defined by a series of scary changes, but staying the same would have limited your potential for growth of all kinds.”

The notebook was closed, and the girl began to speak from the heart.

“And in truth, you still don’t really know where you’re going. You have a knack for technology, but you know you could be happy elsewhere. You reach deep into your emotions to produce beautiful stories that your friends are excited to see. Even if the path feels difficult, you’re always on track to grow and reach a road eventually.”

She leaned close to the figure, tearing up slightly as she talked to them.

“You will become the person you want to be. You’re going to fuck it up, like, a whole lot. But you’re going to be amazing. All you have to do is keep moving forward, always. You’ve got your friends behind you, you’ve got your boyfriend behind you, and hey…”

“I always knew I’d end up being amazing, so I know the exact kind of person you’ll become.”

Spark emanated around the girl, indicating that her time was up in this period. She moved away from the bed, looking fondly at her past self. A subdued smile crossed her lips as she was pulled back into the timestream, back to her present. Life had been filled with difficult moments for her, but through her simple action of going back in time, she proved that they brought her to where she was.

They were worth it.

Every time.

Inspiration

Have to admit, it has been fun writing more abstract or experimental stories. I love every bit of writing work I do but having to think about a piece in an unusual way does leave me with a good bit of satisfaction. 

The idea for this story came out of a discussion I had with my roommate, we were just idly talking about where we had ended up and the, sometimes unwise, decisions we had made in the past. Despite all of the hardship that some of these might have caused, we both were in agreement that without some of them, we would not have met the people in our life who are important.

This, combined with the ever present meme of a trans person going back in time to their past self, led to me wanting to explore how that would work for me. 

Definitely used a very introspective mind to be able to write this, more so than usual. With my usual character stories I can draw on various elements of myself to provide inspiration or add a character quirk. In this case, I was literally combing through my own memories to get the story structure together.

Confronted a fair few difficult memories by doing so, and yeah, there’s a lot of “what if” questions I can ask. But I’m not going to waste time, cause I know what I need to do to keep those memories just that.

Keep moving forward.

Keep being awesome.

Keep growing.