Falling Through Timelines, Towards You
A piece of prose about teenage loves and "what if?"
You asked me if I ever think about alternate realities and branching timelines, the ones created by all our choices and mistakes. And though I always have, I think about them more often now.
Who would I be if I’d let myself believe that he could want me too? If I had reached for his hand as the screen flickered, the characters’ perceptions blurring the line between reality and hallucination? As we steadied the tv against the wall, if I had said yes instead of laughing, swallowing my want in fear of being caught? If I had let him close enough to change the shape of my memories, would his lips have rewritten my story?
Who would I be if I had noticed him sooner? If I had let myself see the way he always found me in a crowded room? If I had realized then what I know now? We didn’t waltz, didn’t follow any steps — we just laughed, twirled, and swayed when the music slowed, caught somewhere between childhood and whatever came next. Would we have grown up together, his hand in mine through teenage summers, his number on my back in a college stadium, cheering his name like it was always meant to be mine?
Who would I be if we had never drifted apart? If one of us had held on tighter, if we had risked the distance, if we had let late-night phone calls and whispered promises carry us through? Would we have been high school sweethearts, counting the miles between us but never the reasons to walk away? Would I have been yours, and you mine, the way our mothers always joked we would? Would I have worn your last name as easily as I once wore your friendship, carried your love like something steady, something certain? Would we have built a life where best friends became something more, where love was something familiar instead of something I yearned for? Or were we always meant to let go, meant to become strangers who sometimes wonder?
And you — who asked the question, who set these thoughts spinning — who would I be if our words had never crossed? Or would you have found me anyway, somewhere, somehow, as if we were always meant to meet?
And in another life, another thread of time, did I know the shape of your hand in mine, the quiet weight of your gaze, the way your lips felt pressed against mine, the way your name became my own? Did we become something more, or were we only ever meant to be a question left unanswered?