The Other Life

The one you romance is the one you never have to live.

The mind only romances what it hasn’t lived.

The other job. The city you didn’t move to. The person you didn’t marry, or the one you did and sometimes wonder past. The friend you let go quiet. The version of you that left when you stayed, or stayed when you left.

You built them. Alone, on the bad nights and the slow afternoons. A whole life that never had to survive a single ordinary day.

That’s why it glows. It never got cold. It never got boring. It never woke up next to you at 3am with nothing to say. You never had to live a Tuesday inside it.

I chased one of mine. Walked it onto the ice and watched it go quiet there. The dream you carry is never the thing you reach. The thing you reach has weather.

So you’d think I’d have learned.

I haven’t. I’m already romancing the next one, already staring at a horizon I’ve decided will mean something, knowing it’ll be Tuesday the moment I arrive.

That’s the trap, and knowing about it doesn’t get you out. We’re not built to live the life we have. We’re built to ache for the one we don’t.

The dream always lies. You’ll go anyway. You should.

Not because the other life is real. Because the reaching is.

So stop polishing the one you’ll never live. And go put weather on the one you’re in.

G.