The idea of this was that it would be written more as prose, but that it should be read more as poetry. As such, some of it is symbolic, a bit disjointed, sort of stream-of-consciousness.
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The other day I was walking past the University commons, and I thought about what might have been. How much I miss you, and how I would have done things differently if I had them to do again. The different choices I would make to keep you from leaving. I kept going back further and further, changing the timeline again and again, until I got to the point where we met... and I kept going. How different our lives would have been if I could go way back, back before we were both damaged by those we'd been with before we met. I went all the way back to my High School graduation, these 20 years gone. If I had gone to NKU right out of school, and known what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, instead of allowing others to dictate to me what I should be doing. I would have left my family behind, would have looked for you. I would have found you as a fresh-faced youth, young and full of energy. I would have been more gentle with you, less sure of myself, of my opinions, less certain of what I knew. Would you have been more patient with me, knowing that I was also just coming out of my youth, that I was just as malleable as you? Would you have been less likely to grow tired, to give up on me? Would we, together, have raged against the world and our place in it, and done wonderful things together? Would we be together now, with twenty years of strength and experience behind us, binding us together, safe and secure in one another?
What would we have avoided in this other timeline? I would not have had to learn the value of barriers in the same way, would never have know the man who beat me down and tempered me into a less flexible creature. You would never have known the one who betrayed you so brilliantly, leaving you frightened of abandonment. There is a strength I would not have developed, but would it have been replaced with one less austere, less unforgiving, less demanding? Would I have learned the trick of patience earlier on, when it would have been easier to give in without giving up something of myself in exchange? Would you have learned the trick of knowing when to listen to me, which parts were important and which merely an intellectual exercise exposed by the flawed light of language? Would I have learned the trick of speaking only the important things, and not taking you down the side streets and alleyways of my tangential mind, leaving you lost and clinging to all the wrong conclusions? Would we have found a happiness that could pass through this pain, stronger and more secure, rather than walking away when circumstances and our differences became difficult? Would we have found a mutual method of communication, drawn the map together and avoided the pitfalls into which we trapped each other in this life? Or would we simply have found other ways to hurt each other and ended up in the same place after all? Was this the unavoidable page in our story?
I sat down and thought about this at the laundromat, after. Our lives are our stories, and while we can go back and re-read what has happened, we cannot know what has not. We cannot go back and make different choices. We are made up of our experiences, those things we know. There is some unseen to what we are, but not so much that we would make different choices. To go back without knowledge of what we have become, we would do it all the same. Perusing the different timelines, the possibilities of what might have been is a fruitless endeavour, I think. While it might enlighten us as to where we are, it can also trap us in the same place, paralysed with fear, unable to move forward. I am who I am, you are who you are. Twenty years ago we were different people, and if we had met then, who knows... we might not have had the love for one another we do now, broken and imperfect as it may be.
This I know now. I miss you. I love you. These things will not change. They may ease with time, the pain will subside; it will become a part of who we are, our 'New Normal' as you so aptly called it. It will become a part of the story we use to define ourselves. While we may repair the damage done in time, we won't be the same, for we are already changed. Going back to erase mistakes risks losing the lesson of them, and I for one wouldn't change that. In knowing you as you are, in this time and place in my life, I have learned a lesson I won't soon forget. While it hurts now, and will for quite some time, I am grateful to have had the opportunity to know you, to learn from you, to learn you as well as more about myself. I will take this time to show my appreciation and gratitude to you and of our time together to internalise this, to not make this same mistake again. Not the mistake of trusting, of letting someone inside my boundaries, because I don't think that is a mistake at all; the mistake was in doing so with my eyes gilded, unseeing. The next time, I will walk in with my eyes wide open, missing nothing. The joy, the pain, the imperfections that make us who and what we are.
Those other timelines are for other people. Those strangers who bear a passing resemblance to us, who aren't the people we are. That other you, that other me, I don't know them. The you I love is the you I know. The me you fell in love with is right here. Hurting, but healing. Growing, learning, becoming the me that I will be further along this timeline. I want to share this new me with the you that is also here, hurting and healing, but that page has yet to be written. If this is where our paths diverge, then I want you to walk away with but one thing. You are amazing, as you are. I can only imagine how much more amazing you will be in your future. Perhaps someday, in my own future, I will know. I will look back at this moment, and think about what I could have done differently, and come to the same conclusion. Nothing. This was the path I chose. This was the story I wrote. This is where I found some happiness, and for that, I am glad.
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