What if, swimming against the tide

What if I had my bike with me that day, and we had gone just a couple of miles further along 2nd St? We would have come to a little beach park, overlooking the bay. I would have swum, like I did there today, maybe you would have swum too. Things might have been different. You wanted someone to come home to, and we could have been that for one another, perhaps... Except that you didn't even acknowledge this was what you wanted, you only projected it onto me, saying it was what I wanted. And I'm not certain it is. It would have been nice, for sure. But I'm pretty happy coming home to my cat and my dog and my kids, listening to Bach really loud and cooking lentil soup like my grandmother used to make it. Yet I still think of you there now, waiting for me on the beach perhaps, not knowing you're waiting just there for some other reason, as I swim back to the shore against the tide, avoiding a trail of jellyfish. I know that reality doesn't work like that, that all the what ifs spangle out in other dimensions only to peter away and they don't generally loop back into this one. What if the jellyfish had stung me on the way out? They might still sting on the way back in. There are other less pleasant what ifs, spreading from our encounter, measured in millimeters rather than miles. Am I condemned to be haunted forever by all the what ifs?

And all the others. You who remembered that I wanted to swim in the bay at midnight and that's why I would like to be where you are now, near the ocean. If I were there with you we could have played hooky and biked to the beach together instead of waiting for the train that is running late. Why do I feel like I've missed the boat and you're on it?

Why does there always have to be a you? Maybe my present happiness is conditional on the one who is always there, just a phone call away. You will never read this, because you think it's silly, and you're probably right. Probably, you will never be here for me to come home to, but you know that I'm here for you. I hope you know that. Thank goodness we've stopped playing at maybe, forgoing the small pleasures of life for the sake of some future that might never happen to either of us, whether each for ourselves or one for the other.