Back to the Now

The buzzing started faintly.

Not the buzz of an iPhone. No vibration alert from a smartwatch. Not even the chime of some sleek Bluetooth speaker.

No—this was the sound of a plastic-encased alarm clock, red digital numbers blinking 7:00 AM, ticking over to life with the screech of a radio trying to tune itself through static.

“—and that was Ace of Base with The Sign! Coming up next—Alanis Morissette, and later, some classic Friends trivia before the school bell rings, kids!”

Nate blinked. His eyelids felt like they were covered in molasses. His fingers clutched at fabric—not memory foam or a micro-quilted duvet, but a bumpy cotton comforter covered in faded Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

He sat up.

The room around him was small and square. On one wall, a poster of Michael Jordan in mid-air, dunking. Another wall sported a Jurassic Park movie poster, complete with T-Rex silhouette. A lava lamp oozed blue and green blobs beside a bulky TV with a built-in VHS slot.

“What the…” Nate mumbled.

His voice sounded different. Younger.

He stumbled to the mirror over a scratched wooden dresser. The face staring back was freckled. Barely a hint of stubble. His hair—his hair!—was full, floppy, and sun-bleached like he’d just come back from summer camp.

And his hands? No wedding ring. No calluses from a decade of typing at a standing desk. No Fitbit. No veins popped from anxiety and too much coffee.

“What is this?”

He rifled through the drawers. Baggy jeans. Windbreakers in neon. A Street Sharks T-shirt. He opened the closet. High-top sneakers. Rollerblades. A backpack with a Goosebumps keychain dangling from the zipper.

Downstairs, the smell of Eggo waffles and bacon pulled at his memory like a lasso.

And then came the voice.

“Nathan! You’re gonna miss the bus!”

Mom?

But not the fragile, white-haired version of her in the hospital bed he remembered saying goodbye to. This was the same voice that used to shout up the stairs on school mornings when Beavis and Butt-Head were too loud the night before.

Nate practically ran downstairs, tripping over his own socks.

In the kitchen, the calendar read October 1996. The phone on the wall had a six-foot cord. The countertop had a bowl of Fruit Loops, and the tiny tube TV in the corner played Good Morning America—Bryant Gumbel and all.

And there she was.

“Mom?”

She looked up from pouring coffee into a World’s Best Mom mug. “Who else would it be, smart guy?” she teased.

He stared at her like he’d seen a ghost. Because he had. And she was laughing now, shaking her head.

“Don’t tell me you were up late again watching Unsolved Mysteries. Honestly, you look like you saw a ghost.”

“I… I think I did,” Nate murmured.

On the school bus, Nate sat in the middle seat—just like he used to—next to Jay Patel, who smelled like Fruity Pebbles and still had braces.

Jay passed him a folded note with a drawing of Pikachu. “I heard you kissed Michelle on the cheek Friday during Truth or Dare. Respect.”

Nate laughed—giggled, really.

It wasn’t a dream.

Or it was a dream. Everything else was the dream.

The crushing rent. The endless scrolling. The algorithms. The dopamine drought. The emails at midnight. The sterile offices. The doom-filled news cycles. The empty likes. The pandemic. The masks. The Zoom calls. The friends lost to depression and fentanyl and online conspiracy holes. The divorce. The burnout. The silence.

The years.

Thirty-eight years old. And it had all been…

Gone.

Instead, here he was, a twelve-year-old boy in a 90s world where the loudest sound was your Walkman skipping because you ran too fast.

That first week, Nate was in a daze.

At school, the biggest news was that someone carved a bad word into the desk with a Swiss Army knife. Nate aced the vocabulary quiz without studying. He quoted Seinfeld jokes that hadn’t even aired yet. Teachers praised him for “maturity” and “quick wit.”

In the cafeteria, they served rectangular pizza with globs of cheese that stuck to the roof of your mouth. Lunch came with a Hi-C juice box and no social anxiety. No one posted pictures of their food. No one was filtering their lives. No one was screaming in comment threads.

They were just there. Laughing. Chewing. Living.

At home, Nate binged on Gushers and Saturday morning cartoons. He watched VHS tapes with trailers for movies that came out months earlier. He played GoldenEye 007 on N64 until his thumbs hurt. And he fell asleep to the sound of the dial-up modem his parents just got installed for “educational use only.”

It was heaven.

It was peace.

It was a second chance.

But something else crept in.

A twinge.

A whisper.

A dream within the dream.

One night, Nate dreamt of a woman—her—standing at the top of an escalator in a mall that no longer existed. She wore glasses and a red cardigan, holding an iPhone and staring at it like it had betrayed her. Behind her, a girl with his eyes asked:

“Daddy, what’s a VCR?”

And he couldn’t answer.

He woke up with a start, breathing hard in his child-sized bed, the faint glow of the lava lamp casting green across the room.

Who was that girl?

Was that… his daughter?

Did he have a daughter?

Was that part of the dream… or the part he forgot?

On Halloween, he wore a homemade Power Ranger costume and collected more candy than he had since fourth grade. Back at home, he watched Are You Afraid of the Dark? and ate too many Kit Kats. He fell asleep smiling.

But he dreamed again.

He was back at a funeral. Rain. Gray suits. A closed casket. His hands gripped another’s—a woman, sobbing. The girl again. Older now. Wearing black. Her voice cracked.

“Dad, are you okay?”

He wanted to answer. He wanted to scream. To say her name. But she disappeared.

When he woke up, he stared at the ceiling, heart pounding, the air heavy.

The next day, he found the family computer and opened AOL. It took ten minutes to connect.

He searched for her.

He didn’t even know her name.

“Dreams of future family.”

“Time travel amnesia.”

“Lucid dream becoming real life.”

The results were garbage. Astrology blogs. Urban legends. Goosebumps fan pages.

In frustration, he pulled out a spiral notebook and started sketching her face from memory. Her nose. Her hair. The dimples.

And the girl.

He didn’t remember her name either, but she had his laugh.

By Thanksgiving, his room was full of sketches.

Mom noticed.

“Nate, who are these people you keep drawing?”

He couldn’t explain. Not really.

“I think I… lost them. But I don’t remember how.”

She touched his forehead, checking for fever. “Maybe you’ve just been having one long, weird dream.”

By December, it started happening.

Time skipped.

He’d be eating dinner, and suddenly he was in gym class. Then playing Mario Kart, then waking up back in bed. Days blinked by. Weeks collapsed into moments.

One night, everything froze.

Literally.

The air stopped moving. The lava lamp paused mid-blob. The glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling hung like real ones—suspended, eternal.

And a voice—familiar—spoke behind him.

“So… you want to stay here?”

Nate turned around.

There, sitting cross-legged on his bed, was a teenage version of himself. Dressed in flannel and Doc Martens. A slap bracelet on one wrist. A Tamagotchi blinking from his pocket.

“You look like me,” Nate said.

“I am you,” the boy replied. “Or I was.”

“Am I dreaming?”

The boy shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“Is this real?”

“You tell me.”

“I—” Nate stopped. “I don’t want to go back.”

“I know. But you have to ask yourself something.”

“What?”

“What did you miss?”

And with that, the ceiling split open.

The mall.

The woman.

The daughter.

His office.

The long drives with her asleep in the backseat.

The wedding.

The first time she held his hand after her first day of school.

The messy house.

The fights.

The reconciliation.

The mistakes.

The forgiveness.

The loss.

The life.

All of it.

Not perfect. But his.

He saw her face again, smiling, older now. She reached for his hand.

And he understood.

It wasn’t about escaping.

It was about remembering.

He opened his eyes.

Beeping machines. The smell of antiseptic. A heart monitor pulsing steadily beside him.

He was older again. Back in his hospital bed.

The nurse gasped.

“Mr. Loman?! You’re—you're awake! Doctor!”

A blur of footsteps.

His wife—Elise—rushed in, eyes wide with tears.

“Oh my God, Nate!”

And behind her, just outside the door, a teenage girl peeked in—freckles, braces, a Stranger Things hoodie.

“Dad?”

He smiled.

“Hey, kiddo.”

She ran to him, nearly knocking the IV stand over. Her hug was real. Warm. Familiar.

“You were out for so long. I was so scared.”

“I know. I saw you… in my dreams.”

“Creepy,” she giggled.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “But also kind of wonderful.”

That night, as sleep returned, he whispered a thank-you to the 90s.

To lava lamps and Fruit Roll-Ups.

To VHS tapes and school dances.

To his mom and her waffles.

To everything that made him.

And to everything he still had to live for.

Because even if it had all just been a dream…

He was finally awake.