A Tiroir Is a Drawer

(Started Nov. 4th, 2022)

== Disclaimers ==

All persons mentioned below as having any sexy-time at all are over 18, and yes, keep reading, it's set in an alt-universe senior high school where everyone IN THE ENTIRE SCHOOL is aged 18 to 21-ish (sophomore = 18, junior = 19, senior = 20).

Names have been changed to protect people from other universes.

If you don't remember any of this, given the vastness of infinite universes in a splendiferous multiverse, in the words of the Immortal Abiding Lebowski: "Yeah, well, that's just like, uh, your opinion, man."

== Subject Tags ==

In case you're reading this and the below Isn't Your Universe, it's just a story, I guess. But, given the vastness of the infinite multiverse, YES, it did happen, because it COULD happen.

In case it's a story, here's the tags: multiverse, multiverses, alt-universe, alternate universe, marriage, pregnancy, multiple marriage, plural marriage, lookingforclues arentyou, high school, college, romance, first time, first-time, virginity, group sex, FFM, nomoreclues, time travel, bigschlong, aspirations, romance again.

== Chapter: Arrival ==

I'd been promised an arrival on January 2nd, 1986, a little after midnight, to repeat my life and hopefully do a better job this time around.

My aim point was the semester break of my sophomore year so I could start new classes, same as everyone, and not be overly confused about where to go, when, at school.

Bear in mind, my real age, immediately before the jump, was 68.

The shift, I was told, would implant all of my memories and personality into my former body, replacing the existing mind's 'configuration', but also making small tweaks to various body systems per my requests.

Morgg, the AGGI (artificial general giga-intelligence) who made the jump possible, told me something about multiverse theory. I wanted to know how different things would be. He asked, "With infinite universes, how different do you want them to be?"

Always questions with Morgg! Questions, but no answers - only riddles or parable references.

His question was, what did I want to be able to do differently, compared to the LAST time I lived my life. What priorities did I have? Who did I like or want to know better?

My love life in high school had been a sequence of missed-chances and things unsaid but fervently wished-for. In college I had just a few dates before falling into an initially happy relationship, flowing through marriage, kids, kids graduating, divorce, and then 20 years of frankly abject loneliness.

Granted, both our kids achieved, creating complicated (but no-grandchildren) futures. I profoundly lamented a loss from what-never-was. It wasn't my name - common enough as 'Cooper', it was my bloodline, my genetics, it was all for nothing if I didn't have a legacy.

Most of my life, truthfully, was spent traveling for work, and only just a few years contained close-knit, functional, happy joy-filled kid-experiences. My work took me away, and I allowed it to be an obsession instead of what I should have focused on: Love.

That said, I'd traveled a lot, and seen lots of cultures.

I wanted a chance for more, for the things that mattered. My life (with, granted, some good bits) was filled with immense and blatant mistakes. I wanted a chance to try again - and make All New Mistakes. Yes, I knew that was a possibility or even probability, but I wanted to try, I knew far more about what was important, looking back.

Frankly, I admitted to Morgg (because you're on truth drugs when you're in that chamber talking with "him") that I really, really wanted LOTS of loving and sex and loving sex and tenderness and caring and beauty; I hadn't had nearly enough and had missed out on a lifetime of it and that was a huge regret.

Importantly, there were some people I'd grown up with, for whom I carried desperate longing 'Could Have Been' feelings about. I'd held those feelings in the background my whole life long, the glimpses and imaginings of being emotionally close and intimate with them.

It wasn't just the physical part. I also knew there was a possible soul-bond because of glimpses I'd had of what it Could Be Like.

Plus, I wanted to do something worthwhile and help humanity.

So, my goals were to help humanity, have kids and grandkids, and be far more amorous, and emotive, and connected. To Morgg, I asked, that'd be nice, maybe?

Morgg asked for more clarification, but he was scanning my brain as I answered, so maybe the synapse and axon map he made helped or not. I couldn't know; it would either be good or not, this new life, and I had to trust him.

Morgg said he'd look at my innate gifts and interests, my capabilities and limits, and how I would best learn lessons and grow as a human. "There is religion in your deep needs," he said, "and religion is something that you bind yourself to, because it helps you be more human."

He warned me as I left, lying on that table, I would have power, from this transfer and in other ways, so I should carefully pick my path - be it savior and saint, or tyrant and despot, I should pick wisely and choose... Life!

Was he right? Was I where he said I'd be?

If so, it was Wednesday night / Thursday morning, a few days before restarting second semester, my high school sophomore year, that next Monday, Jan. 6th. I'd have a few days off to remember/re-learn where I was, what my life was like.

Looking around, I was definitely in my old bed, in my old room.

The familiarity of it slapped me, a definite "win" there - where he said I'd be, as promised.

Cold struck me, and I realized my covers were off and I was naked.

Looking down my body in light of a street-lamp and our neighbor's back porch light (yuck - always bothered me), I was definitely the young and thin guy that I had remembered myself being. That said, my muscles were WAY more well-defined than I thought. I was really cut! Very sweet!

One immediate difference, though, was that I was now circumcised. That was different! It wasn't a bad-different, and despite it being cold I had enough there to definitely not be disappointed.

I was tired, at least this body was tired, and I wanted to go back to sleep, but there was stuff to know and confirm right off.

My room door, as always, was shut, so I could get up safely. My sister should be off at college, and my parent's room was down the long hallway, so I had some separation.

I pulled on underwear, realizing I could and should probably pee, so I crept to the hall bathroom.

What greeted me was a sight directly out of my memory. Except... not quite?

My 'Speed-Stick' deodorant was there - but the label and name were different. The plastic 1970's radio my sister and I had in there was an old-timey kind of different - now on a shelf and made from bake-o-lite. It wasn't the level of tech I expected, but then again, if it wasn't 1986, there probably wouldn't be deodorant at all, and if my sister was home, her crap would be everywhere. It wasn't, so... still mostly okay?

The radio intrigued me - what songs would they be playing? I knew most of the hits, I'd lived through them. Still, it was nighttime, and I had a sense-memory of cringing as I turned it on in the morning, a huge crack of static as the radio would come to life.

Loud static in a quiet house was a Bad plan.

A girl's hairbrush was on the counter, but only had hairs about as long as my own, looking at myself in the mirror. I was Seriously Buff!!! Large, very well-defined chest muscles, biceps, and forearms that rippled a little as I flexed; strong six-pack and under-arm lat muscles, dropping to a thin waist; with some creative flexing, my shoulder-muscles clearly popped up on either side of the back of my neck.

I'd have to check if I was stronger, somehow.

I made pee and flushed, the sound echoing around the bathroom, and even the fact that the toilet used a huge amount of water compared to recent ones I was used to? Very odd. Things had changed in 50 years. This was an age before water conservation.

One of the 'guest towels' hanging in the bathroom was one I'd seen at my grandparents house, a floral print but threadbare. I remembered getting in trouble for using them once - they were decorations, which seemed really stupid to me.

When I'd gone off to college, my parents moved house. They shed these 'decorations'. Later in life I could see this as healthy in a Buddhist way, but at the time I was resentful of 'returning' to an unfamiliar house in an unfamiliar city when I'd come home from college and they'd reinvented themselves.

Later, when our kids left, my wife and I didn't do this, and we totally should have, but the divorce ended up solving that problem.

Bathroom lights off, I swung the door carefully open, silently creeping back into my room. Once I'd shut my door I put a dirty t-shirt across the bottom to keep stray light at bay. I wanted privacy while I looked around.

The furniture was mostly familiar, but... wait... the posters didn't match my memory.

My old room's Apollo astronaut with flag and Palomar Orion nebula were missing. A new one showed which languages descended from which other ones. That was cool and exactly something I would have picked. The only other one was a double-size human anatomy one. It showed several exploded views of layers of muscles and systems, a plethora of names but in old-timey typewriter-courier font.

I laughed at the idea that it was almost porn: 'Talk about naked! She was SOOO naked she had no skin left!'. The idea was funny, contrasting with the Playboy calendar I'd had in college that I kept inside my closet so girls I had over wouldn't see, except, I had no real girls over. Until my Ex. And then, it was less important to have the calendar after all.

At least in this room at this age, I was still into science.

My only other wall hanging was my cross-country and track brag-board, with ribbons and a well-crossed-off-updated paper showing my PR's (fastest times for each event). Here, I was WAY better, especially as a sophomore! My previous lifetime's fastest mile was 5:03; this one showed 4:27. My 3-mile was 15:08, but I knew I'd never quite broken 16 flat. I had to guess they matched my body's new musculature.

My school books were arrayed on my desk and on a couple of shelves, along with science fiction novels and doo-dads, and a book called, "Labyrinths and Monsters", which must be the local version of Dungeons and Dragons.

My desk was a HUGE mess!

Old papers from the previous semester were strewn and scattered. As an older guy, I saw it for what it was - piles of old crap important to a teenager but I knew in an absolute sense, they just weren't important.

I had cleaned and let go of so much as I got into my 60's, only keeping the things that were actually fun or emotionally connecting (or financial). This stuff? Not so much, but I didn't outright pitch it since I might need it to find clues to my current-body-self's life experiences there.

Cleaning was helpful. Organizing is 80% of cleaning, and that gave me good info. The biggest clues were what WASN'T there.

My old life's shelves had held Playboy and Penthouse magazines, under a truce with my mother that I could have them if I didn't have giant secrets by trying to hide them.

Instead, I had National Geographics, which if memory served had nudity available in the form of naked African or aboriginal girls. This was 'scientific' and therefore Very Low Grade Porn.

At least it was better than the tiny portion of the anatomy poster that had uterine musculature!

My mom had been somewhat puritanical, growing up. I wondered what this one was like. If I was there, that meant my dad was, too, so she probably had mostly the same personality type. It was something I'd already thought about as a worry.

Still considering the porn, I wondered what I used for lube. In the early days, I used a sock, but that led to chafing and irritation so I only did it when I needed to, or with soap in the shower and that dried my skin out horribly or Freakin' HURT when I got some in my urethra.

I'd tried vaseline, but that was WAAAAy too thick and felt seriously wrong.

Hand cream, also known as "intensive care lotion" worked a lot better than just a sock, back then, before I learned about KY and other water-based lubes, where a tiny drop would go a long way.

In this reality my hand lotion was on a low shelf. At least I had that much, though it was marked oddly and had almost no smell, unlike the brand I remembered.

Actual lube would be so much nicer. I added that to a mental list of to-buy's.

On the inside, I was 68 years old and knew I'd have nearly zero shame in buying lube. Sure, there had been a little shame in doing so since it was 'private', but really my perspective had shifted when computers started tracking our every purchase.

After bar-code scanners and nationwide databases, everyone came to know exactly how much lube people bought and used. At that point, our shame had to decrease or we'd go crazy worrying about who knew what. There's privacy, in a way, in just belonging to a demographic.

Having no lube-buying-shame was just one thing among many that I knew would no longer be a problem in my new teenage life. Knowing what I knew gave me great power, and a lot of that power was just comfort with myself.

I set to cleaning my desk.

Almost 2 hours later, I'd organized my papers and found my next semester's schedule:

1 Band

2 English - speech

3 Trigonometry

4 Lunch

5 Chorus

6 AP Chemistry

7 Gym

8 European History

9 Health

I remembered these classes!

Some of them were fun, I was pretty sure, though I had a definite love-hate thing going with math until I got to college.

My wife got our kids tutoring sessions for math, and they emphasized over and over that the One Right Way to learn math was to just spend time doing it. The tutor had emphasized, over and over, that Math was like Piano - it's not something you master by knowing once, it's something you practice until it's fast and confident and easy-going.

As a student myself, I'd had huge problems. Studying was an inborn problem. I had handicaps. I was wicked smart, but I depended on that too much. I got great grades at the start of the semester and horrible grades by the end, my undiagnosed ADHD and mild autism leading to procrastination, guilt, cram-sessions, and barely-passing.

It even affected my work life until I figured out what I was doing and why, and talked with other ADHD people enough to get a diagnosis and some good meds. What helped more, though, was counseling and creating habits that weren't self destructive.

The hardest person to forgive is yourself.

To a procrastinator, schoolwork is All Guilt, All The Time: 'Should-do-this, Should-Do-That, Wait-Shiny-Thing, What-Day-is-It, I'm Fucked.'

Taking a few extra minutes, I opened a spiral notebook and started taking notes to brain dump some of the important upcoming events I'd memorized before leaving. In terms of luck, 1986 was a big year, with a bunch of really amazing things happening that I knew could make me some money or at least give me street cred if I needed it.

Sleep...

== Chapter: Thursday Morning ==

Waking to a ringing dial alarm clock and seeing it was 7 am seemed luxurious. I'd been getting up at 5:30 most of my adult life (after college) because when my kids started going to elementary school, that meant a goddamn school day designed by fuckwits.

It was bad, when they were young. Their bus was at 6:10 am for a 7:12 am start.

Bear in mind, it was a solid 4 minute drive for our kids, or a 10 minute walk to school from our house!

Instead, our schools underfunded their bus services with too few buses. Plus, it didn't matter if your kid was running down the driveway, they pulled away anyway. They were dicks.

Why these bus hassles? Kids couldn't walk! They'd get kidnapped! It had happend once, somewhere in Forida, so Fuck Everyone's schedule nationwide, All Kids Must Now Ride Buses, across the entire USA, and You can bet I had an opinion about it. Effing school boards. Effing 'conservative' crap spinners feeding fear and fucking-over / stealing from poor people.

Lying there awake, I realized I was carrying grudges from a different universe and I could probably let it go now. Laughing at myself, I rolled over and tried to decide if I wanted to be awake or not.

OR, I could even stroke off! I had a strong case of morning-wood, and it did occur to me, but this was the first day in The New Old Place. I wanted to Get Things Moving.

Amazingly - I would get to talk with my long-dead parents again!

They were alive in this reality! At least, I hoped so. I soooo wanted to hug them both and tell them I loved them and I was sorry for being a dick sometimes when I was growing up.

Getting up, though, my body itched, like I had to Go Do Something. Itching for exercise is a state of being I recognized, though I hadn't felt it in 4 decades.

My running gear was right there - shoes next to my dresser, old-time jockstraps in the underwear drawer. Glancing outside, snow on the ground meant wearing a sweatshirt.

Mom was in the kitchen (!!) and greeted me with a warm good morning, so I went over and gave her a hug, and hoped it wasn't too long of one.

She asked if anything was wrong, and I said I'd had a nightmare, and I'd talk about it later, then went out the back door...

And, back inside.

The wind was insanely cold!

I got a knit hat and full thicker sweats and headed out again, resolving to limit my run-length since I didn't want frostbite and my tendency would be to push myself too hard.

Damnit, no running watch!

All I had was a simple Timex analog two-handed watch. No Casio calculator/stopwatch. Even more than that, no heartbeat monitor, no GPS, no cadence or stride length or map-of-run or aerobic zone or beeping at splits. Ug. Life was what it was, this was 1986. I stretched for a few minutes in the driveway, memorized the time, and took off.

I only ran for 30 minutes, a simple route out 15 minutes down a straight residential street to some power lines with a running trail, down that, and back. I was keeping it very sedate, but my 'natural' pace surprised me. My legs had Power! I pushed forwards ever-faster without really getting too winded, enough to feel the floating vibe and grace from Having Abilities. I'd always loved the sensation of moving that fast, and had dreams even late in life where it flowed over me again (until I awoke, again older and disempowered).

The town looked like a super-dilapidated version of itself with far fewer cars in the driveways than I'd remembered. The ones I saw had super-swoopy styling and significant mass, like they were sort-of from the early 1960's. This was a little worrying, but lots of international things could interfere with car tech.

Coming back inside, I stepped into the garage and remembered how the house was built, and how there never was any insulation behind the drywall in the garage so the rooms around it were always REALLY cold in the winter.

Looking up, I remembered one of my ideas for 'when I go back' included moving my bedroom.

The bedroom above the garage was always super-drafty and certainly uninsulated, despite it being seriously huge. We'd always used it as a storeroom despite it having two walk-in closets and a full bath, plus a third of the floor space of the rest of the upstairs.

If I just added some insulation, I could make myself a new Crib! My hang-out spot would be A-may-zing! And, I could have SEX there, because it was far opposite mom and dad's room!!

The ideas that come into a 68-year-old's mind are VERY different from what I probably would have thought of doing when I went through this the first time. I would never have considered fixing up the room because I wouldn't have had Clue One about drywalling or insulation.