MAYBE THIS IS A MISTAKE....
Chapter One
I remember the moment my family and I decided we were done with 2030.
Not because everything was falling apart.
But because we had spent two years quietly comparing decades.
It started as a joke the first time my dad pulled up the Time Relocation Registry and said, "Hypothetically, if we were going to reset somewhere, where would we land?"
We laughed about the seventies. Debated the early 2000s. Crossed off anything too unstable, too restrictive, too unpredictable.
And we kept coming back to 1993
Not because it was perfect.
Because it felt balanced.
My parents remembered it clearly. Clear enough to know its flaws. Clear enough to know its limits. But also clear enough to remember something we were missing in 2030.
Space.
By 2030, everything felt optimized and expensive at the same time. Groceries climbed monthly. Rent didn't make sense anymore. Every election cycle felt louder than the last. Every issue became a battlefield before it became a conversation.
It wasn't that we were miserable.
It was that we were tired.
Tired of the volume. Tired of the acceleration. Tired of feeling like we were reacting instead of building, ideas of just living.
My parents didn't romanticize the nineties. They remembered the discrimination, the policy failures, the social blind spots. My mom would say, "Don't confuse quieter with better."
But they also remembered something else.
You could afford to start.
A small apartment didn't require three incomes. A mistake didn't live forever online. A career didn't demand a personal brand.
And at 23 that mattered in a world full of performative activist, influencers...everyone's heard but at the same time no one really is.
People care ....but not really.
It feels like I have the same chance that previous generations before me had.
And that meant a lot.
I cared about social justice. I cared about mental health. I wanted to contribute something meaningful. But in 2030, every conversation felt like it was happening at maximum volume, and I wasn't sure I had found my voice yet.
1993 wasn't an escape.
It was an investment.
Time travel had been federally regulated for nearly a decade by then. You didn't just pick a year and vanish. You applied through the Department of Temporal Relocation. You submitted background checks, psychological evaluations, financial disclosures. You signed the Non-Interference Agreement.
No altering major political events. No leveraging future knowledge for wealth. No introducing technology ahead of its time. No claiming someone else's ideas as your own.
Every relocation was documented. Monitored. Approved.
It wasn't a fantasy.
It was a file number.
And after two years of discussions, spreadsheets, and late-night "are we really doing this?" conversations, we finally submitted ours.
We sat around the kitchen table when the approval email finally came through. Four names. Four biometric confirmations required within seventy-two hours.
My mom Rosie reached for my hand first. "Rosalyn..everyone, Before we confirm anything," she said carefully, "if someone feels this is a mistake, we say it now. We don't drag anyone into a life they don't want."
"That's dramatic," Raine said, grinning. "It's the nineties. It'll be fun. Vintage everything."
I sigh "Raine, once we go back to the 90s its not considered vintage anymore. It's gonna be our reality"
Silence settled over the table.
And then, quieter:
My mom squeezed her hand. "Then we talk about it."
"We stick together," Dad said.
That was the rule in our house. We didn't make life-altering decisions without everyone standing on the same side of them.
I looked at my sister. "It's not about Blockbuster and flannel," I said softly. "I don't even care about that stuff. I just... I want to breathe again, feel normal. "
That was the first time I said it out loud.
And no one laughed.
