Writers Jam

“Tell a Tale of Time Travel”

I time travel through the women in my blood.

When I walk barefoot on cool marble floors, I hear the anklet bells of a grandmother I never met, whose rage was silent, whose prayers were not.

Time travel, for women, is not in machines. It is in memory. In recipes we don’t write down. In bruises no one sees. In a laugh that sounds like someone else’s. In the mirror, I time travel by accident….one minute I am eight and invincible, the next I am twenty-five and soft in all the wrong places. I am both: the child and the tired woman she becomes.

I return to girlhood in dreams, wearing uniforms too tight and expectations too loud. I visit a future where I am not told to be less hungry, less loud, less tired of being small. A place where no one asks me “where I’m from,” like they’re looking for a mistake in the map of me.

I travel through time every time I say no.

Every time I pick a name for myself, every time I laugh without shrinking, I bend time. Every time I leave a party early and safe. Every time I stay. Every time I choose.

They think time travel is bending physics. But I know it’s bending lineage. It’s surviving long enough to become the woman your grandmothers could not. It’s kissing someone in the light. It’s not apologizing after.

My body remembers things my mind has forgotten. It holds the weight of women I love, and the silence of ones I couldn’t save. I time travel not to escape, but to stitch the past to present, pain to power, girl to god.

And in some distant year, a daughter of mine might close her eyes and feel me in her. Not as burden, not as blueprint. But as thunder. Sudden, certain, shaking the walls of everything that tried to hold her in. The kind of sound that doesn’t ask for permission, only room to arrive.