Figment of Your Imagination
Time Space Warp #76
Hey — It’s Toffer.
They say you can’t go back.
I did.
I’m sitting in a church, next to a boy whose feet don’t reach the floor.
The priest is about to say the strangest thing this kid has ever heard. He won’t even flinch.
Estimated read time: 2 minutes
The body of Christ. Bread that isn’t bread.
He didn’t soften it. Every Sunday, he said, we line up to eat a man. We hold out our hands for a God the size of a coin, swallow him, and call it the most ordinary thing in the world.
The grown man in me did what grown men do. Filed it.
This is symbol. This is metaphor. A nice story we agree to tell on Sundays.
Forty years of knowing had taught me how to stand outside a thing and name it from a safe distance.
The boy beside me was me. He wasn’t standing outside anything.
His mouth was already open.
When his turn came, he walked up, held out his hands, and ate. It never occurred to him not to.
I leaned over to set him straight. The bread is just bread, kid. You’ll understand when you’re older.
He looked at me the way children look at adults who are obviously, sweetly wrong.
And I’d had it backwards my whole life.
He wasn’t the simple version of me.
I was the figment of his.
He’d imagined the man he’d grow into, and this is who showed up. Someone who knew more and believed less.
Your Friend in Time,
Toffer