The Gingerbread Time Travelling Machine

I'm watching my mom bake gingerbread cookies. She's settled for gingerbread women and pigs. Maybe her own form of silent feminism. Or maybe she doesn't care. Although I think she likes the pigs.


I stand here and I think it's nice, to return to this strange fantasy land sometimes, where feminism ends with gingerbread women and who won Idol is the only news mentioned with half a care. Where people bake cookies but eat horrible pre-made food and synthetic candy, both equally casually. This place is and will always be what it is. When I'm here, I understand why change should take place between generations, not during. I can see why we shouldn't rush so much. Because there's a safety that comes from knowing who you are and where you're going, when things don't change overnight. Not the things that matter. Like the fact that there must be gingerbread.

My mother asks me to choose one last shape. I make her make some cats and stars, because I want a cat and a star in my window. I don't really eat gingerbread, but it's pretty.

And I think that this moment in time, I'll miss it one day. I don't know when that day will come, but one day I'll stand somewhere and I'll remember this precise moment, watching a myriad of little gingerbread cats come into existence, and I'll miss it.

And then I think, there's no way of knowing that right now, this isn't a memory too. Right now could be younger me looking into the future wondering is she'd still be standing there watching mom bake, just as well as it could be old dying me remembering those who have gone before me. Spacetime is funny like that. Everything is now. For a second, it's like my mind wraps around creation itself and I see through the eyes of all me, all the infinity triangles that create the circle that we call me. We gather in one single spot to see/remember/imagine this one moment.

It's soothing. It feels like home, that place. I can never stay for longer than a fraction of a second, but it feels more like home than any physical place in the universe.

One day I'll remember this exact moment, and in that moment, I will be one of the many me that saw through my eyes today. And I was wrong. I won't miss it, because I'll be here. It will be happening then as much as it was happening now. I've created a time travelling machine of gingerbread and cats. And love? Maybe love.