Not The First Time

In a previous post I mentioned a love story that I could tell, of a chain of love that I found myself bound to during my time at University.  I've been reminiscing about that time in my life some 13 years ago now and I've made a realisation that I never made before.  The guy I fell for I always assumed the first time we spoke we hit it off and everything went by so fast, but the truth is that I have realised we actually met once before, six months before everything happened.  The meeting was by chance, a conversation that was brief, about nothing consequential, but it serves a purpose.  Looking back on that first meeting, there was no chemistry, there was no connection.  We spoke briefly, parted ways, and didn't speak again for almost six months.

There's a quote from a British Sci-fi series called Dr Who where the Tenth Doctor said: "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff" - the episode was called Blink [Season 3, Episode 10] and featured the Weeping Angels a rather sadistic race that feed on time energy, their method of extracting it was to send people back in time ripping them out of their natural timeline and feeding on the energy that is released as a result.

The quote from Dr Who makes me imagine our lives as threads that weave through time, our path in life determining the movement of the threads.  I wonder how many peoples' paths I crossed and how many threads became interwoven with mine.  That first meeting I can imagine as two threads passing briefly but never connecting.  The second meeting that led to all that happened I imagine in my mind as the two threads twisting around one another.

How many people do we meet by chance in life that could have turned out to be so much more had we made the connection there in that moment.  We often think of people who enter our lives and become so much a part of it that we wish we had met them sooner, if we had, would we have connected at all?  You met and you clicked because you were in the right place at the right time, you were both in the right mindset.  If it had been another place or time, what might have been?

There isn't really a point to this post, like nostalgia in general, we indulge in it for the feelings it evokes, but when that nostalgia leads to realisations of our past that almost completely change our perceptions of it, we're thrown into a whole new world of possibilities and opportunities that create a fountain of new ideas and fantasies about what might have been.  You can't rewrite the past, at least not through conscious choice, but realising things were not the way you recall them does indeed take that which we know, rewrite it, and present us with something different, something old, yet new all at the same time.