What a funny concept, I thought to myself. No matter how much I genuinely believe that one road leads to an objectively better destination, there would still be a haunting curiosity to look back, and see if the other road brings a more scenic route, or a generally more pleasant drive, perhaps. There may not be an exquisite turquoise lake at the end of it, nor endless white sand beaches with crystal clear inland lagoon – perhaps even just a rugged cliff with the rocky valley at the bottom of it. Leaving ones with no options but to turn back to where the roads start diverging, or jump into the cliff and end it all for good.
We’re now halfway on the first road – and it gets annoyingly bumpy now. I don’t know if shortly, we’d be in a shimmering metropolitan city with the world’s tallest skyscrapers that are featured in those box office movies, or in the middle of a lush hill with fall-coloured trees overlooking the vast ocean. I hope it’s the latter, because no matter how majestic people said the first was, I never had an appetite for a bustling city anyway. It was never for me, no matter how they’ve advertised so hard to convince me that I’ll find my true calling there.
We played songs from the radio as you drove, and I hated what they reminded me of. Although subconsciously, I actually enjoyed it. It just makes me feel guilty, because there you are, trying your best to get us to the destination you promised us, yet here I am, silently relapsing all the sequences where I used to feel thrilled, high on life, and nervously excited, while that particular song played in the background.
But you weren’t in those frames. Those memories belonged to me and anyone but you.
I have bid my final farewell to whoever involved, I really did. Out of politeness and my devotion to what the two of us have built together over time. But I could apparently still tap into those memories to playback the feelings I had – the feelings that are no longer, that are now largely absent in our atmosphere, and yet quite frankly I’ve missed so fucking much.
I felt a surge of transient joy, but now there’s even more guilt. From even daring to watch those clips back – although I had promised myself to lock those tapes up for good. And from wondering why our memories can’t produce the same pleasure – even though we did everything as we were supposed to. Correctly, carefully, and calculatedly.
Or is it because we’ve played everything safely by the rules thus far, and I was never one for a sense of security?
Or that I do still wish I had used up all my allowances to rebel out and damage that part of me in all the hopeless places when the time was still ticking, before the call arrives for us to act like two responsible adults?