One day as I am walking home, all alone, after another hellish day at school, I trip and skin up my arm. Too depressed to even stand, I just sit and decide to see what unknown item had just screwed my day up even worse. It's a lamp, and not just any lamp. It's a stereotypical magic genie lamp. Angry tears well up in my eyes as I toss the lamp as far down the street as I can, and then, I continue my earlier task of staring into nothing, hoping to get some peace before I go home.
Suddenly, I'm knocked over by a running dog who leaps into the air mid stride and takes the shape of a genie. It glowed so bright, I had to look elsewhere. "Wow, I must have finally cracked."
"I have no time for your silly rambling, girl," snapped the genie.
I didn't answer.
He sighed and began to stare intensely at me before he sighed again and said, Your heart's wish is my command."
Next thing I know, the street, and the cars, and the houses are all gone, and I'm starring into a window watching my life rewind. I see the time we had to get rid of our favorite dog, Fuzzbucket. I saw the various houses we lived in. I saw my entire past, until it reached the point where my life was at it's highest: the time before my parents broke up and before my life seemed to have shot out from under my feet.
It plays forward, different this time. Now, instead of the strenuous divorce process, and the continuous fights, my parents loved each other and didn't dare think of divorcing.
In this new reality, we never lost our house, we still have a car that fits us, and I can look at my siblings without feeling instant remorse of what we have lost. Our family never broke and we never lost ourselves in the process. We had the love of any normal family. We were happy. I looked back at the genie and what I felt at that moment beat any feeling I had ever felt. That genie was no genie at all. It was, in fact, an angel.
And then I knew, in this new reality, we are a family.
