Let Yourself Live

This awakening started as a dream.

I found myself backstage at a rock concert, my hands holding black curtains and my face peeking through. The place smelled of cigarettes, perfume, beer, and old amps—the scent of youth and expectation.

It felt familiar. At first, I thought I was in the present time, at a concert in one of the small venues here in Manhattan, where I now live in my 50s.

Then came the realization that sent shivers through my body: The concert was in Croatia, the capital city of Zagreb, where I grew up as an asphalt kid. I knew the venue very well. It gradually dawned on me that I was in the exact place I frequented, the same band, and the event I attended when I was 15!

The teenager me might be out there in the audience. Oh, the thrill of the possibility of meeting my younger self! What would I tell him? Then I saw him, curly hair, plaid shirt, and jeans, calm, fresh, unlived.

"I know," I thought, "I can make his coming decades so much easier. I can warn him about three wrong turns he doesn't have to take, share with him three revelations about the future that would make all the difference, or gift him with three tried and tested life tips that he could keep in his pocket for the moments when he would need them the most."

And then, like it happens in dreams, the next scene was me walking up to him at the concert's end.

I stepped before him, our eyes met, and I asked, "Do you know who I am?"

"I think I do," he said, slightly nodding.