WHAT IF????

I am sitting in a narrow light brown bricked laneway. Outside a nightclub, not just any nightclub but the nightclub I first laid eyes on you. This time it’s different though, it’s 10am on a Sunday morning. The only noise I can hear is that of the mild breeze rustling the leaves on the branches above me, the noise is soothing, it’s filling my soul with peace and reminding me that I am indeed alive.

The sun is up and shining brightly, I can feel its warmth on my skin. It’s a very different scene here today, outside this club from the night I met you. There’s no one around. No loud music, no friends, no drunken street kids, no young girls in skimpy clothing exposing more than the eye cares to see, there’s no musicians.  Just me, the wind, the trees and the empty shell of a club. There’s a stillness in the air. As I sit here I am taken back to that night, and I can’t help but play out the thought that plagues my mind from time to time; what would my life would look today if I had walked away that night ?If after what I had seen, I had run away and  never looked back. The answer shouldn’t matter, because I didn’t run away. I stayed. And I shouldn’t be thinking about the ‘what ifs’ yet my circumstances force me to ask those questions. To examine the past, in order to help me understand the present.

So I sit here clutching my strong skim cap in one hand and my keys in the other. I should continue walking through the narrow laneway until I reach my car and go home, yet, for some reason today I choose to stop, to give those two very important words ‘what if’ some thought. What if I never met you, would I still be who I am today? Would I be happier? More trusting? More loving? Would I be married with two kids living in that white picket fenced house that I had envisioned years before my eyes met yours. Would I even be divorced, having known what I know now and having discovered it so late in life? or would I be unhappily settled and married, too scared to leave, trapped in a loveless marriage for the sake of my children. Would I still be who I am today if my past was different? Would I be a better person or someone far worse? Or most importantly would I be living my dream? Would my dream look different to the one I have now, here, today?  or would I have taken a completely different path if I had a choice? Would I be a mother? A wife? 

I know life has no room for regrets or 'what ifs', it is a case of sliding doors and sometimes we miss that train. Sometimes for the better, other times for worse, but we can never really know until we completely live out our lives and see where the path of life leads us.

We need to accept, grow, change and learn from our mistakes, but today, when this beautiful sunny Sunday  seems so gloomy and the future seems so far away and hope seems to have escaped me, my dreams seem like they belong to someone else, and I am alone,  it is here, today, now that I am forced to ask myself ‘WHAT IF?”