Have you ever fantasized about having access to people from the past to tell them anything you want about the present?

I do. Often. Now that I think about it.

They exist in a temporal bubble, isolated from any timeline, unable to exert any influence on the present. I can tell them whatever I want without worrying about classic time-travel movie tropes — like tearing a hole in the space-time continuum (Great Scott!) or Marty McFlying myself from existence (this is heavy…)

There are all sorts of people I imagine being trapped inside my temporally insulated sanctuary, however, two people in particular show up more often than not — my parents. Specifically their past selves from my childhood, way back in the late 1900’s (as my kids refer to it).

Why, you ask?

To be clear, my parents are alive and well — this mental exercise amounts to me presenting a little show-and-tell of amazing and terrible things about their future and imagining how they might react.

Look how great I turned out! See my beautiful family? The Internet is everywhere and we have self-driving electric cars now and a goofy TV personality got elected President — twice! — and he’s tearing the country apart like a Kleenex at a snot party! Please let me stay here with you just a little longer!! My heart medication can’t compete with this!

Perhaps more importantly, I can tell them how certain things, for better or worse, haven’t changed a bit. I’m still the same wishy-washy introverted person I was when I was a kid, just with a long gray beard and fatty liver.

While all that is true, I think there is a bit more to the fantasy than just blowing their minds with barely believable tales of the future.

You can’t go back (but you can pretend)

My parents divorced when I was 21. It came as quite a shock to me. I had lived my whole life up until that point blissfully unaware of any issues. As far as I knew, my parents had the greatest relationship in the world.

I believe that was either because a) they were especially good at insulating me from that part of their lives or b) that I was, as I have always been, very much living in my own head (colloquially known as “having your head up your ass,” but I’m kinder to myself these days).

While both are likely true, the latter probably had greater bearing on my general ignorance to certain realities. As a withdrawn and inward looking kid, I showed little interest in shared experiences outside of a tight social circle, never paying much attention to the world at large, preferring to live in my own imagination. I’m not all that different now, just a little better adjusted for the sake of “adulting”.

Despite my being an adult when it happened, I think there is a part of me that still holds them together in my mind as a child would. Maybe that’s what this daydream is about — staying in touch with the version of my parents that ceased to exist 25 years ago. I guess I miss them, or at least the idea of them I had in my head when I was a kid.

In the real world they’re both alive and well and have moved on with their lives. Both are in good health and good marriages. They are still very much a part of my life, and I’m grateful for that. I have a family of my own and life is good.

Still, every once in a while I feel the need to conjure up their younger, imaginary counterparts in my mind to talk to them about what’s going on in the world — which is funny because I never was much of a talker, then or now. I think I’m just looking for the shock and awe of people learning unbelievable things about their future.

A future they will never experience because they’re stuck in a time bubble of my creation.

I think I would also tell them about myself as an adult. I want to reassure these imaginary people that I turned out OK (at least in my estimation). I imagine they would have lots of questions of their own regarding the future.

I might conceal the fact that I was their son to avoid influencing their line of questioning — maybe sneak some questions of my own about their kid to get the insider perspective on me when I was a scrawny little thing.

Does anyone really want to know what their parent’s thought of them when they were kids? Maybe not.

But still…