Down a winding path I found a dead end. It seemed a nice little cul-de-sac, and the Halloween lawn decorations were tasteful, in the sense of not being gory. It was not, however, where I wanted to be, as far as I knew. I had been looking for a used bookstore that Google told me was near my work, and as the week was over and I had a little time before my next rendezvous, I thought I’d loaf around for ten minutes and see if there were any titles I wanted to pick up. There was no bookstore. This had happened to me once before in my hometown. Google said there was a bookstore nearby, but it turned out it was just somebody’s home who sold books online. Not a place to perambulate or sit quietly and listen to the whispers of time-yellowed pulp.
I sighed and drove to the end of the lane where there was space to turn around. Then I was stabbed through the heart by a wild pang of nostalgia, but nostalgia for a past that I had never had. As I came to the turn, I looked down into a quiet ravine, not grand in any sense, but there were a few trees. I longed with a longing I cannot explain to myself, to sit under one of those trees as a child, and felt a horrible loss in that I never did, that I never jumped this fence and wandered down that slope or walked off beyond where my eye could not currently see.
All the pains of heartbreak overwhelmed me, and it was something that had never happened. Not even a regret, not a failure, not something I might have done. Here was a bit of life that I suddenly found I would never know and could never have known but for the ghost of the unlived life I didn’t live nor ever even have had the opportunity to live.
Something similar had already happened to me this week, but some dreams we do not speak aloud or even whisper for they are too terrible to be remembered. Eventually, I turned my car around and drove off toward my next stop, a dinner with my dad. It struck me, passing many different and good restaurants on the way to the restaurant we had picked, that life was full of these unlived unlives. To choose one restaurant is to not choose all the others. To live one childhood is to not live many other childhoods. And to fall in love…but that is only a dream.
It was really a comedy trying to choose the restaurant. We all agreed to go out. I suggested a few places. Everyone liked the suggestions. Then we spent about twenty minutes all agreeing that any one of those places would make a good meeting spot.
I was quite satisfied by the dinner. I might have been satisfied by all the other dinners available, but the object was got at. However, as was my dream, and my dream was a dream from childhood, my youth is something I mostly wish to shove into some dark hole that will never know light. I do not know if I would have been any happier (I sometimes wonder if I can be happy at all) growing up on that strange street, but I know that I am dissatisfied by the childhood I did have; I can’t even say why.
And hadn’t my mind dwelt on it all the weary day? Especially, that one horrible year? Wasn’t it after all that loneliness and frustration that I finally quaffed sweet and deadly apathy? Have I been dead all the years hence? Was that a dream of the future I didn’t have?
I came to a cul-de-sac. A ravine is there, a few trees there, there is a fence that wants to be jumped, but there were no children on that street, no children jumping the fence, no children climbing the trees or wandering through the tall grass. The tasteful decorations were very few. There was no bookshop either, and I am still haunted by an awful longing I cannot explain.
Tale Told 