I'll Stop the World

by Lauren Thoman

I don’t think fate causes things to happen, but once they do happen, they have significance.

Justin listened for a second; then his eyes widened in recognition. “Oh, I’ve heard this one,” he exclaimed, sounding surprised. “They did a COVID cover of it. I watched it on YouTube during lockdown.” “They did a . . . what?” Rose said. Most of the words that had just come out of his mouth sounded like total gibberish.

“It doesn’t get any less overwhelming when they get older,” Diane said. “Just in a different way. And you just learn to take what they give you as it comes and love them through it all no matter what. There’s no secret. Just love.”

I miss Netflix. And texting. Not really social media, though. It’s funny, how quickly my anxious brain has adapted to the relative quiet of 1985. To not knowing everything that’s happening, everywhere, all the time. If not for the whole being-stuck-in-the-wrong-decade thing, I think I’d actually find it kind of soothing.

I feel like I should tell you, I’m not sure I even believe in God.” “That’s all right, sugar,” she says, patting me gently on the cheek. “Maybe he believes in you.”

She wondered if anyone ever, in the history of the world, had experienced this feeling, or if it was just her. Plenty of girls had loved boys who’d died. But as far as she knew, she was the only one whose boy had come back decades later, raised in a world that he’d helped create, even though he had no memory of it.