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It’s every Tuesday night. You’re killing time scrolling social media before bed, when the platform suggests a connection. It’s the guy (or gal) you had a crush on in college. You even told your parents that no matter what they say, he’s your soulmate. But then he dropped out. Trying to keep in touch with people before the internet basically didn’t work out very well. You never saw him again, despite the wishful thinking you two had. After all, the whole thing only lasted your sophomore year. You moved on.
Now, you have a life, a family, a career, the whole nine yards. But life has a way of making you pull your hair from time to time. And now, seeing this person’s picture, you scratch that hairless spot and wonder what life would have been like if you, too, had dropped out of college and followed your sweetheart. It opens a can of what-ifs about most of your life choices and throws them against a wall of reminiscing, romanticizing, selective memories, and the realization that the life in front of you is getting shorter and you are speeding through it faster and faster.
You click that button and wait for the other person to accept your request. Your heart flutters, and you even blush a little. Will they remember you? How can they not? You told each other so many truths; how could they forget? Have they thought of you in all these years? What are they up to? What would it be like to talk again? The questions race through your head faster than your heart beats. You keep checking your phone every few minutes, waiting for a notification. Surely, they’ve seen your request already. What if they don’t care? What if they do and want to see you in person?
Your imagination of the what-ifs conveniently flattens the years of building your actual life to a sentence. The joyful moments, planning, anticipation, growth, adventures, challenges, fights- everything boils down to “I’ve never felt that way since.” The imaginary future you didn’t have somehow emotionally overshadows the present.