It was what it was. Wasn't it?

There were dozens of things I was going to do, crazy things and sensible things. I was going to be a mover, driving people across the country to start new lives, meeting people and bonding and then moving on like a 70s television hero. Or I was going to own a small home near the woods where I could touch the opposite walls with my fingertips and be a mad hermit poet. Or I was going to be a ballet dancer, since what else can you really do with perfect turnout.

Everything seemed probable. And everything still sort of does; I could pick up at any minute and we would be sleeping in the back of our moving van, or we more simply could move and live at the cottage. The ballet dream is pretty much done. But I still could mostly do what I had wanted to, except I think I don't want it anymore.

The difference is that the life I have is also a life I wanted, one of the possible trajectories from who I was then. I don't feel in any way like I betrayed my truck driving self by becoming an editor, because I had an equal number of feature fantasies in which I had a green visor and sleeve protectors. The costume changed, but the dream I wanted was the same.

To me, there is a web of lines emerging from every choice, and each choice makes others possible. I don't see it as having a choice, and that choosing one thing is endlessly cutting off the other, because lines can loop back; I don't see Billy Pilgrim's centipedes exactly either, where everything past is linked to an inevitable now, but I also don't see a series of captured moments, unlinked. To me, you get to where you are from where you were, and the lines can be traced no matter how entangled, no matter if some snapped as you ran across.

And so I have trouble sometimes reconciling the person you've become with the person I thought you were. I can't see how you got to where you are from where you were back then. Perhaps my choice to stop willfully charming people makes me as different from who I once was as you seem now different to me. Or perhaps I've made smaller choices slowly along the way, not even noticeable individually but cumulatively changing me and it's me who's different and you're moving on a consistent path. I don't know. I do know that it's strange to look across a table and see the eyes I once knew looking at things I don't really understand; the mouth I once knew forming words I never thought I'd hear, not while sitting with you.

Comments

[the patriarch]

Fucking people, always changing.

[tuckova]

I've come to terms with change as inevitable, and I tend to complain more when people pretend they haven't changed when they have, but some changes leave me gobsmacked.

[Mom]

I have observed that this is frequently a problem in marriage as couples age. Many years downstream one of the pair notices that indeed the other half is NOT the person they married. This offers multiple opportunities, throughout the years, to flirt and court all over again! A shame we often see the change as a betrayal, instead of a chance for a good flirt. Love, Mom

[Sj]

Beautiful.