The walk home from Rico's studio always felt like traversing two worlds. Steam rose from manhole covers into the violet dusk, and the familiar silhouette of the projects loomed ahead, unchanged from my memories of both timelines. A group of kids clustered around a battered boombox, their freestyle verses echoing off brick walls – raw talent that would have gone viral in another decade, but here existed only in the moment, pure and unfiltered.
Mom waited three blocks before speaking, her breath visible in the cooling air. "Your teacher called today." She pulled her worn jacket tighter, the same one she'd wear for two more winters before I could afford to buy her a new one. "Says you've been sleeping through calculus again."
In my other life, this conversation had ended in a fight that stretched into weeks of tension. I'd been too proud, too certain of my path to see how fear fueled her anger. Now, with the weight of years I hadn't yet lived, I heard the tremor beneath her words.
"I'll do better," I said, meaning it differently this time. "Maybe we could set up a study schedule around the studio sessions." The words felt strange in my seventeen-year-old mouth – too measured, too mature. I caught Mom giving me that look again, the one that suggested she sometimes didn't recognize the son who'd gone to bed one night and woken up different.
"Marcus." She stopped walking, forcing me to turn and face her. Behind her, the McKinley Houses cast long shadows across the playground where I'd first learned to rhyme. "What's really going on with you lately?"
The question hung between us, heavy with implications I couldn't address. How could I explain that her son had lived through twenty more years, had seen both triumph and catastrophe, had held her hand in a hospital room that now existed only in a future I intended to erase?
"I just..." I chose my words carefully, balancing truth and necessary fiction. "I understand things better now. About what you've sacrificed. About what matters."
Her eyes searched mine, finding something there that softened her expression. A passing car's headlights caught the grey strands in her hair – fewer now than in my memories, and I silently renewed my vow to keep them that way.
"You talk like an old man sometimes," she said, shaking her head with a mix of amusement and concern. "Ever since that fever last month."
The fever – their explanation for the morning I'd woken up with twenty years of future memories. I'd played along, letting them attribute my changes to delirium and recovery. Sometimes I wondered if that was kinder than the truth.
"Maybe I just grew up a little," I offered, managing a smile that felt both genuine and guarded. Up ahead, the lights of our building flickered on, each window a snapshot of lives being lived in linear time, unburdened by knowledge of what lay ahead.
Mom reached out and straightened my collar, a gesture so achingly familiar it made my chest tight. "Growing up is fine, baby. Just don't grow up so fast you forget to live now."
The irony of her words wasn't lost on me. Here I was, with two decades of life already lived, trying to find my way back to this moment, to do it right this time. As we climbed the stairs to our apartment, the bass from someone's stereo vibrated through the walls – an old Jay-Z track that wouldn't become a classic for another few years.
"I was thinking," I said as Mom unlocked our door, "maybe I could help out with some bills. Rico thinks he can get me some paying gigs, mixing for other artists."
In my previous life, I'd made this offer too late, after she'd already taken on the extra shifts that would wear her down. Her protest died on her lips as she saw my expression – whatever she found there must have convinced her this wasn't typical teenage bravado.
"Let's talk about it after you bring those calc grades up," she said finally, but her smile held a new warmth, a glimmer of recognition that her son might actually understand the weight she carried.
Inside our apartment, the smell of her famous arroz con gandules filled the air, and for a moment, the past and future blurred completely. I stood in the doorway, watching her move through our small kitchen, committing every detail to memory – not from fear of losing it this time, but from gratitude for the chance to live it again.
The notebook in my backpack held verses that wouldn't be written for years, beats that hadn't been invented, and melodies that would define eras yet to come. But for now, in this moment, I was just a son watching his mother cook dinner, blessed with the wisdom to know exactly how precious such ordinary moments could be.