Losing What You Never Had
Is this all there is?
One of my earliest memories was when I was six years old and writing in my diary about how sad I was about how much time had gone by and how I’d never get that time back. As silly as it might sound, for someone so young to have such a sense of melancholy about these things, with their whole life ahead of them, that feeling never quite left me. The passage of time, the inability to hold onto fleeting moments, the mourning of the things I’d lost to the march of the clock has haunted me since I can remember. Quite literally. The older I get the more profoundly I feel its grip.
The thing they don’t really tell you about aging is that the forks in the road ever narrow, and you can feel it. There becomes a list of things that grows and grows that just aren’t possibilities anymore. Choices you could’ve maybe made ten years ago that are off the table now. Things you will now never do, or be, or see, or know. Your future goes from open wide, an array of doors to walk through, to a long hallway mostly going in one direction, a couple places to stop and rest along the way. Beyond those things, both real and unrealized, I feel this sense of mourning for not just the paths not taken but for the paths that could’ve existed in some other universe, but not this one. As our world seems to accelerate towards utter dystopia I feel this great, heavy sense of loss blanketing me for a world I never even knew, a world that doesn’t exist. In between the articles about yet another daily massacre in Gaza, in between driving to the store and seeing people who live their lives without a home to call their own, in between watching people sacrifice their humanity for power, I get these glimpses of the world that could’ve been. A world where no one goes hungry and where people feel a sense of connection and duty to each other. A world that isn’t so much a number of cohabitant particulates sharing the same air but that is a body where we matter to each other and where we have some semblance of self determination. I get these flashes and it feels so real. And then I snap back to what we are living in. Loss, deep, profound, encompassing loss is the only way to describe it. Not for what once was, but for what never was, but what should’ve been.
My heart screams out “we don’t have to live like this!!” And I know it to be true. And I can use historical materialism and explain the dialectics of how we got here and why we are like this and how in gods name this became our reality but if I’m being honest a part of me will never understand it. I will never understand why anyone would choose to live like this. To blithely accept that yes, some of us need to suffer, some need to die (an ever-expanding number of us it seems) so that others can live like kings. To just accept all of the human agony that this way of living causes as if it is a neutral event, just like the rain. I cannot accept it. And so I mourn.
A part of me is still that little girl of six years old trying desperately to grasp onto the ether of times past but really times that never were because I know it doesn’t have to be this way and I know that it is a choice that is being made every single day to perpetuate hell. To build a hell here on earth for each other to live in. And the older I get the less sense it makes. Far from resigning myself to “that’s just the way it is” (which would be a mercy really), I feel the further sense of what we’ve lost, what we’ve at times freely given up, to have what we have.
And of course it is mostly not our decision and people live lives of quiet desperation never knowing there’s another way and millions want to escape but don’t have the words or the coin or the time. And it’s mostly not our fault. And all of this is true but that part of me still wants to desperately cry out and shake every passing stranger and scream and say “don’t you see what they’re doing to us!!??” and frustrate that world in my mind into being. And I cannot. I can only do the small acts I can do and I can only live the tragically short human life I was given and I can only plant one or two trees for others to sit under. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t kill me.
To me, now and probably always, that unrealized world is realer than real. Perhaps at times realer than the horrors I see every second of every day. That path not taken, that vibrating string that’s like our world but not, but better. It’s still there. It’s sometimes the only thing that even matters. On a personal level I want my life to mean something, for myself or for humanity, for something. On an even more personal level it probably means very little. Only a few of us get a chance to change the world. I’m just a speck of sand. But as long as I live that part of me that screams out for a world that never was and mourns the losing of it will be there because it’s the thing that keeps me human. It’s the thing the bastards can never take away. Maybe it’s me breaking my own heart over and over again but the worse fate, to me, is resigning myself to “as good as it’s gonna get”. To just think that all of this monstrous suffering is the cost of doing business. Some sort of acceptable sacrifice.
I don’t know if we find our way out of this. Life has taught me some hard lessons and the hardest of these is that not every story has a happy ending. Sometimes it’s just an ending. A whimper in the dark. There’s no inevitability to any of it. But that’s the thing. There’s no inevitability to any of it. Not this future either. So I don’t know, maybe it’s important to hang on to the improbable because at least it’s not this. At least this isn’t as good as it gets. And that’s something.
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You're not alone. The feeling of lost possibilities, branches ending in dead ends, feeling like you need time to make the right decision and then realizing time made it for you. When things are more hopeful than I can honestly say they have been for a while; this way of looking at the world and seeing and feeling so much potential or at least the better side of things- it's a gift. Lately it feels like a curse, to be forced to see without feeling able to make enough others see how much worse it can still get.
Beautifully put. I live my own, very similar version of this and often suspect most of us do too, on a fundamental level. It’s easy and depressing to think that I’m alone in feeling this way though, so reading your words gives me hope and lightens my day. Thank you.