Back in time

If I Could Go Back

If I could travel back in time, I wouldn’t go to some famous moment in history. I’d go home. Back to my parents’ kitchen table, to sit across from them—not as their child, but as the adult I am now, carrying the weight of the world we’re living in.

I’d tell them about the day the towers fell, and how September 11 changed everything. How the skyline itself became a wound, and how our sense of safety was shattered in an instant. I’d try to explain what it was like to live through those weeks—flags waving from porches, neighbors holding each other close, and at the same time, a fear so deep it still echoes today.

And then I’d have to tell them about now. About how even after all we endured, the divisions grew deeper instead of healing. I’d tell them that Charlie Kirk, a man who spoke his mind—sometimes too bluntly, always too loudly for some—was gunned down in the street. That in this America, words can make you a target, and that freedom of speech isn’t just debated in classrooms anymore; it’s contested with violence.

And I would talk about our family—the family they knew, the one that once gathered around Sunday dinners and birthday cakes. I’d have to tell them how even we, bound by blood and history, sometimes find ourselves divided by how we see the world. How the arguments that play out in the headlines can find their way into living rooms and phone calls, leaving behind silence where conversation used to be. That would hurt them most, I think. Because they raised us to be stronger together than apart.

I’d want to see the look on their faces, to know how they would react. Would they shake their heads in disbelief? Would they say they saw it coming? Or would they remind me, as they always did, that even in the darkest times, we have a choice—to surrender to fear, or to hold onto hope.

Because as much as the world has changed, the lessons they gave me haven’t. That faith matters. That family matters. That truth matters, even when it’s dangerous to speak. Those lessons are the anchor that makes the chaos survivable.

And oh, what I’d give to hear one more time my Aunt Sissy cut through it all with her voice, laughing and rolling her eyes, saying, “Bullshit, Alfie,” when told what the world is like now. That one phrase carried more honesty than any op-ed, more grounding than any headline. It was her way of reminding us not to be swallowed by fear or swallowed by lies.

If I could go back, maybe I wouldn’t just tell them about the world I live in now. Maybe I’d ask them the question that haunts me: how do we live without losing ourselves, when the ground keeps shifting? How do we raise our children in a world where towers can fall, where voices can be silenced, where even dads can be taken too soon?

And maybe, just maybe, they’d answer me the way they always did—with something simple, something steady: We keep going. We hold each other close. We don’t stop believing that tomorrow can still be better.

That’s what I’d want to bring back with me—not just their words, but their faith that even in a broken world, love still holds.