What if I hadn't written anything? What if I had chosen another direction, and not told the skewed story of my life? Would our paths have crossed again? Would we be speaking again after almost a dozen years? Would our lives have gone on as they have these past many years where we were no more than a passing thought in each other's mind? Would fate have conspired to have us meet again? I don't know. I have my suspicions that we would have lived out our days without seeing each other ever again.
But my decision to write about my life put in motion things that I had never intended. First, it granted words that I thought I'd never read again. Then it granted the unlikeliest of days, us meeting for the first time in many a year. It granted stories I'd never known. It granted further conversations. Would I have still written our story, had I known what it would cause?
I had, in the years that followed, to learn how to protect myself. That meant being hurt and damaged in the process, but I eventually learned how to build these walls around my heart. How to create a suit of armor around my soul. And throughout the years they have held. Sure, some got close, but they never hurt - they just disappointed. My defences were sound. And then when we met they all came crashing down. I wasn't me anymore. I was that 2012 me again.
I was thinking about things that I had not thought about in a long time when I wrote about us. Now, I had so much more on my mind. Thoughts were coming to the fore, memories were being unearthed. Everything, keep in mind, out of my own doing and my own choosing. I had to know, I had to understand. And now all around me I see ghosts - the ghosts of us past, where we ate breakfast near my house, Schrödinger versions of us walking around hand in hand in the forever that we are not, the needs we burned is the child we never had.
Some months back I began my great purge : I was fast running out of space, and there's only so much stuff I can have. I was trying to figure out what I could do without, and I turned to the first place I wouldn't have considered before - my book collection. I looked at shelves upon shelves upon shelves full of books I'd never read, some I'd never read again, some I'd read so many times before. I always thought I'd have them forever. But I decided to let some go. As I started to whittle down my collection down to what I thought I wanted to keep, I grabbed a certain book - at once, and unbidden, memories came flooding.
I remember once we were looking at this book, and you'd told me that we'd have a framed map of Westeros in our house. I was so... not naive, no, but so wildly in love and so filled with love and hope that I believed. I believed that these normal things so many people have could be somehow coming my way. Moreover, they would be coming our way. But everything became just another ghost, hasn't it? There was never our place, only the ghost of a dream of it. There was never our library, nor our stereo where we'd listen to our music. There are echoes of ghosts of it, nothing more.
And I know I shouldn't hope - I don't, I can't, I dare not - but I can't help but wish that things had gone different. I wish you'd stayed. I do. I wish you'd picked me. I wish I'd seen you that day, though it would have destroyed me. I wish you'd made it to me, just like you intended. I wish the hand that kept you from making that beeline to me hadn't been there. But life is not made of wishes, it's made of choices. My own choices doomed me to being a pathetic loser, and I accept that I screwed up everything I ever touched. How I wish I had been better - in all ways. Someone who was deserving of you staying.
But it's too late, far too late. For me, for everything. I had to learn how to make my peace with life. I had to learn how to deal with the loss of what we had. I know how to do this. I know how to keep things in and go about my way pretending it doesn't hurt. Have I not kept a façade all these years?
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