a better beginning

Once, I was all but convinced that there would come a morning when I would wake, not in the same bed in which I had gone to sleep the night before, but in my own past.  With a second chance.  I even knew the most likely time and place because so few points in my life hold strong sense memory, one stands out.  It would have been a little too late for changing the person I am at root, but from that morning waking in a strange bed, with brilliant May sunlight on an amber wood floor and the smell of toast and coffee, the sound of women’s voices in the next room, and a television with distressed excitement telling of death I could make a better beginning.