There’s this thing your brain does when you’re lying awake at three in the morning. It pulls up a choice you made years ago and plays it back like a film reel, except this time it edits in the version where you went the other way. You watch that version for a while. You furnish the whole alternate life. And then you lie there wondering which one was real.
I do this more than I should. I probably do it more than most people, but I have a feeling most people just don’t talk about it.
It’s usually the quiet choices that come back. The big ones at least had a moment where you stood still and thought about it. You remember making those. It’s the small ones, where you said yes to something without really thinking or just didn’t show up because Tuesday felt heavy, that return at three in the morning with a whole screenplay.
You never replay the choices that went well. Nobody lies awake thinking, “What if I hadn’t taken that walk that one afternoon?” The brain files those away quietly and never brings them up again. It only pulls up the ones where something stings, and then it asks you, very politely, if you’d like to rewrite the whole thing.
You can’t, of course. You’re standing in a hallway full of doors you already walked through, and they only open in one direction. You can press your face against the glass and look back through them, but you’re not getting back in. The room on the other side has already rearranged itself.
Some nights you can almost convince yourself you’d do it all differently. Other nights you know you wouldn’t change a thing, and you’re not sure which feeling is worse. Both are equally useless at three in the morning.
I think about this when I catch myself going in circles over something I can’t change. There’s a comfort in going over it one more time, as if enough thinking will finally produce the answer that makes it all make sense. I know it won’t, and I go over it anyway, because my brain is convinced that this time, on this lap, the math will come out different.
But life’s calculus works differently…
The overthinking is really just wanting to feel sure. And feeling sure about a past choice is a strange thing to chase, because you made it with what you had at the time. You can’t hand your present self’s knowledge back through the years to the version of you who was standing there. That version didn’t have your information, and you don’t have his reasons anymore, not fully. You’ve both moved on from the moment, in opposite directions.
Its the unknown X that seems like it could be solved.
Sometimes I try to picture what that earlier version of me would say if I could tap him on the shoulder. I don’t think he’d want my advice. He had his own reasons, and they made sense to him that day. They were probably even good ones. I just can’t see them clearly from here, because the view changes when you’re standing further down the road.
So here I am, awake again, looking over my shoulder down a hallway I can’t walk back through. The stove might still be on, or it might not. Either way, I’m already out the door.
Fragments of thoughts in a mind that sometimes walks without light guided by hope and memory… forget it.
I’ll make coffee instead.
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