It Might Have Been

“Of all the words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.’”                                                                                                                                                                               John Greenleaf Whittier

I woke in a fugue because of the alcohol, and the scratch marks on my car later confirmed that I had consumed quite a significant amount of it. Just another agent of escapism, no better or worse than any other, alcohol is like a $10 whore: full of promises but only capable of delivering regret. Pushing that regret and the accompanying haze from my mind, I groggily scrolled through my Instagram. The ubiquity of couple shots, flowers, and chocolate informed it that it was Valentine's Day, a "day invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap", as Joel eloquently put it.

I had nothing extraordinary planned for the day, and I don't think it would have been any different were I to have been attached on the 14th of February 2016.* But what was different this day -- perhaps instigated by the singleness that social media, bustling crowds, and the seas of hand-holding couples made me so acutely aware of -- was the itch to pen some thoughts down.

I'm no longer a nihilist; it's too difficult. We're programmed to the core to have feelings, to care for one another, to sympathise. And feelings preclude nihilism. How can you continue to believe that nothing is consequential when you see the effect of your actions on others. Perhaps the fallacy I committed was to mistake the timeline: on a cosmological timeline, nothing you or I (or even mankind thus far) has or will ever accomplish matters... But continuing down that path leads to misanthropy, which isn't very fun, and if I've learnt anything over the past 21 years, it's that we have some control over which path we walk. 

I may not want to walk along that path, but choosing another is a Gordian Knot of a problem. I've eschewed religion (but who knows, the odds on Pascal's Wager get more and more appealing each and every year), and am not stupid enough to believe that substances that can only provide temporary relief could ever be the permanent solution. And while society would have you believe that the answer lies in the pursuit of fame and fortune, advice to the contrary reappears throughout history. It's enshrined in the idiom "all that glitters is not gold" and the poem Ozymandias. 

The Knot remains, but I'm no Alexander the Great. My efforts thus far have not only failed to untie it, but have pushed away everyone that has helped me...

//

Regret for what I've done to those people fills the void that alcohol occupied earlier. I'm alone today through no fault of anyone else. Less evasively: it is my fault that I'm alone today. Plenty of opportunities have slipped past me. But being my selfish self those opportunities didn't pass me unscathed. I mangled each and every one, and that's why I've avoided any other "opportunities" since, even those cognizant of the risk of mangling. I'm too much of a coward.

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*V-Day... I guess it's nice to have a day of the year dedicated to the expression and celebration of love, but need it be so public and heavy-handedly guided? Why does love need to come in the form of chocolate and ephemeral red flowers? How can you feel special when you know that hundreds of millions of other couples are similarly going through the motions, and that because it's the 14th of February, that at some point your SO is going to "surprise" you with rose petals, candles, THAT favourite song you share, etc... OK I'm just going to stick with what Joel said.