Hindsight 20/20

I’ve always felt like I had something to say.

About what has been the mystery.

I used to be much more public with my thoughts. Out they went, sometimes before I’d figured out what they were doing. Something about them felt important, though I couldn’t always tell you why.

Or to whom.

The audience has remained another mystery.

Maybe I’ve been trying to explain what it feels like to have lived so many lives without ever quite leaving the previous ones behind.

I’ve moved carelessly through environments that required forethought and depth—two things I occasionally remembered to pack after arriving. I’ve lived in different ways, belonged to different households, adopted friends and families, and borrowed little pieces of everyone’s understanding of how to exist.

Everyone had a take.

Everyone had their reasons.

So very many people raised me, befriended me, loved me, and didn’t know what the fuck they were doing either.

I was along for the ride. Sometimes enthusiastically. Sometimes with an alarming lack of questions.

Naturally, I did some REEAALLY STUPID things while under the influence of ignorance. Looking back, I can usually find the place where a little more understanding might have changed the outcome. Unfortunately, understanding has a habit of arriving after everyone has gone home.

Even now, I’m unsure what to do with the word regret. I can recognize a choice I wouldn’t make again without knowing how to separate it from everything that followed.

And when somebody asks me to name the happiest time of my life, I never seem to have an answer ready.

People sometimes look at me with pity when I tell them that.

A misunderstanding.

There are happy moments scattered through places I wouldn’t return to. People I miss inside years I’m relieved to have survived. Whole versions of my life that refuse to sit politely beneath a single label.

I don’t know how to pick a winner.

I do know that the people I’ve loved keep accumulating. Whatever friend or family I meet along the way gets added to the people who have made a home for my existence. New people find their own places among them. Somebody can be long gone from my daily life and still be responsible for how I welcome someone into it.

I wonder how often they’d recognize what they left behind.

That’s the feeling I chase: a faint recollection meeting a new understanding. Something I barely noticed years ago suddenly coming into focus because I’ve finally lived enough to see it.

For a moment, the timeline sharpens.

I can see a little farther backward, make a little more sense of where I’m standing, and imagine how this moment might look to some future version of me. Then little fingers of other people’s timelines start sprouting from my own. A conversation leads back to a kitchen. The kitchen leads back to a person. The person turns out to have taught me something I’ve been doing for twenty years.

They may only remember that I stayed for dinner.

The amount of time we occupy in somebody’s life is a strange measure of what we leave there. A brief encounter can keep unfolding long after a relationship of years has settled into a blur.

What did they carry away from me?

What am I still carrying from them?

And while I’ve been busy becoming all these different people, who have they become?

I’m still along for the ride, hopefully with a little more insight.

Every so often, something comes into focus.

Usually something I was looking directly at.