With a pen awkwardly gripped in my non-dominant hand, I time-travel back to 1960. I don’t want to go.

The hyypnotherapist instructed me to communicate with my child self. I’m on a quest for lost memories of Professor Agnes Jackson, my college mentor, but those memories lie hidden on the far side of childhood terrors. The therapist assigned me writing prompts, for my dominant hand. Told me to switch hands to respond.

Confronted by the rage she’d splattered all over a previous incarnation of our journaling experiment, I do not want to talk to the little girl.

She gives me a headache, and by headache I mean one single vice grip of the skull that lasts for all the weeks I try but fail to avoid her. There she is in the mirror, clad in Mickey Mouse pajamas all day long. Or tee shirt and flouncy orange skirt, a replica of the skirt I wore to shreds when I was four. She co-opts my diet: gobbling ice cream, hot dogs, and QuikTrip fruit cups that are nothing more than the canned fruit cocktail of my kid-hood.

As instructed, I write the prompt with my right hand: What do you want me to know?

Initially, My left-handed penmanship is illegible. I’m mystified how the skill level improves dramatically after half a dozen lines. As the pen travels down the sheet of copy paper on my desk, the handwriting becomes exactly mine from fourth grade, 1960, when I learned cursive. I’m mystified that my left hand, which produced only a scrawl at the top of the page, by the bottom is writing complete sentences. There is communication here, that I don’t quite belive in. So I continue pushing the pen laboriously across and down the page. I tire easily from the effort and the too tight grip of my arthritic hand. I want to stop. Should we stop, I ask my ten-year-old self. “Not yet,” she answers. And then “Maybe.”

The time machine pauses. I wait.

I watch my hand cross the page. The effort is labored, but steady. Halfway through her final lines, I know what she’s about to say. Because my mind outpaces my hand, the sentences appear on the screen of my brain before they appear on the page. I misinterpret the lag as free will. I foolishly think I control the process. I consider stopping. Just stop your hand. It’s easy. The writing stops, by the will of who knows what.

I lay the pen down. Analysis drains away. Anxious energy settles with a soft shhh. The final enigmatic words on the page comfort me as I’ve never been comforted, as the little girl has never been comforted.

“It’s a game,” she says in my fourth grade cursive. “Don’t worry. You can’t lose. Not this time around.”

Later, after I’ve regained elder consciousness, doubts will reclaim their territory. Will this exercise lead me to the memories I seek? I will wonder how a child can sound like a wise elder. I will wonder which of us is the elder, which the child. I will wonder whether time travel has taken me to the past or whisked me into the future, when I’m as wise as a child.

While I’m reading, a sentence will grab me and force me to stop. I pay tribute to other authors by sharing their Damn Fine Sentences with you. Then I recount a memory the words bring up for me. It’s about how books connect with your life.
******

"I distrust happy people."
———Chloe Chun Seim
——--Churn

My therapist asked, “Are you under any stress?”

“Heck, no. Everything’s wonder––. Wait. Yes.” I slumped into the couch. “A friend bought ten copies of my book. Another bought five. They’re writing reviews that are really moving. It’s stressing me out. It’s confusing. Sometimes I go blank.”

“Positive affect disorder,” he said.

Or was it positive affect deregulation? Or dehydration? Or deceleration?

“Negative comes in at a different voltage than positive. You’re wired for negative. Too much good short-circuits the system.”

I perked up. My brain loved to learn new things about itself. Cause and effect lined up. Tissues buried deep within my body relaxed. Electrical currents switched pathways. Rewiring had already begun.

Still, it could take a while for the electricians who manage my gray matter to complete the upgrade. Here’s a warning: On occasion you might rush toward me with open arms, face backlit with positive affect. You might smile at me and exclaim, “What a magnificent achievement.” (And I certainly hope that comes to pass.) If such a scenario plays out, please don’t be alarmed if my eyes glaze over. Or speech slurs. Or my dreadlocks whip around my head like live wires. I’m just short-circuiting.

Watch out for sparks, and back away until the power is restored.

Flat on my back on the floor, the hypnotherapist on Zoom beside my head, I concentrate on convincing myself this isn’t weird at all.

In fact, it’s familiar.

It’s a guided meditation. Except for the part when I talk, that is. What she calls trance, I call me rambling on without a filter.

“We’re going deeper,” the therapist says. “We’re telling your conscious mind it’s okay to remember.”
She suggests I talk about college, since that’s the time period where my mentor is trapped.

THE INDIVIDUAL SESSION feels like a guided meditation, but the process is a research project, which excites me. Turn me loose in a data base, the more complex, the better. There was a multi-year passion for Ancestry dot com, until I hit the wall of enslavement.

To search for my mentor, who passed into ancestor status last year, I dig through a data base called the subconscious.

A deep dive into an academic search engine had led me to The National Institutes of Health, The American Psychiatric Association, Psychology Today, and the Mayo Clinic. According to the research, hypnotherapy has been effective in recovering lost memories.

My energy markers were all on board. My chakras had approved and passed the go-ahead to my fascia, which voted yes, before informing my aura—the entire population of Dawn aspects endorses hypnotherapy by unanimous consent.

The door had opened easily, with a casual comment to a trusted friend/writer/life coach/intuitive.

“I’m looking for a hypnotherapist,” I’d said.

“I know one. Here’s her contact info.”

The therapist, it turns out, lives twenty miles from the town I grew up in—home during my college years. At our initial consult, I like her immediately. She feels kind.

The contract listed the price on a three-session package, and my mind had said whoa, never mind, way too expen—. Before my mind could complete the objection, my fingers had already found Venmo.

WHEN I CLOSE MY EYES, the afternoon sun burns a window-shaped afterimage onto my lids. Our session cruises along, the therapist cooing that I will soon start speaking … anything at all … that comes to mind … about college.

I’m completely at ease, feeling a little naughty for taking this time to ignore my to-do list for something so illogical. Naughtiness heightens the pleasure.

I’m completely at ease until she says, “We’re letting the little girl know it’s alright, that she’ll be safe.”
I stiffen. Oh, hell no.

Internally, the pissed off Negress puts hands on hips, squares her shoulders. I had told the therapist, “Specifically college;” I’d given no permission to go into my childhood. No permission. I’m looking for Dr. Agnes Jackson, not this little … I feel betrayed and manipulated. The rage almost drowns out a tiny ping at the corner of my left eyebrow.

Externally, a different story plays out. Because it belongs to a rational composed adult engaged in a psychological research project, my voice controls its anger. “I’m soooo uncomfortable. I do not want to talk about the little girl. I do not want to go where she is.”

A corner of conscious mind has noted my reaction, surprised at the intensity.

The therapist slides past TLG, smooth as silk. Her tone remains kind. No hint of judgment or impatience.

Oh, she’s good.

Conscious mind now trusts her even more.

After an hour, she brings me back. “5-4-3-2-1,” she says. “You are fully present, refreshed.” “You’ll have vivid dreams now,” she says, “memories will come when you’re not trying, like when you’re cleaning house.”

I look forward to dreaming and to not trying to remember, which will result in remembering.

Days pass. I’m disappointed. Where are my vivid dreams?

I play an audio file that she’d emailed and I’d forgotten. Lying on the bed, I relax into the recorded session, as kundalini energy sends tremors through my body, the way it does in meditation.

When the audio aproaches the little girl, nausea sours my stomach, and the corner of my left eyebrow pings. The spot where migraines originate, but these days, education and behavior changes have reduced the number of migraine triggers to two: weather and shame.

Shame. Conscious mind takes note.

Like an unproductive cloud, the threatened migraine dissolves.

A week later, I replay the session, lying on the bed. “We’re letting the little girl know …” Ping turns into stab. My left eyelid grows heavy as concrete, even though my eyes are closed already. My eyelid is glued shut. I want to turn the audio off. Though, I swear I’m about to vomit, the body erupts in volcanic sobs. The body heaves, wails, snots, and shudders. And then the body settles, as the audio file winds to an end.

Another week passes before I replay the session. “We’re letting the little girl know …” The eyebrow pings. I leap from the bed, scream obscenties at the therapist, and throw the laptop across the room. I want to weep. In reality, I lie still, crushed under a heartache that feels like the house has collapsed on top of me.
I’ve been told I’m tenacious. The next morning as soon as I wake up the thought occurs to me that today I’ll replay the--

Ping.