Two years ago today my best friend and I became homeowners. It is one of those monumental life-altering changes that simultaneously feels as though it was both a lifetime ago and only just yesterday. The anniversary encourages, as anniversaries do, some reflection on what the day marks, what the day means. Two years ago today we took a leap of faith together. We changed the course of our lives in a large and significant way. We wrote our names over and over again on the dotted lines and joked that we were signing our lives away. In some way, we were. Those dotted lines represented the border between who we were and who we were going to be. The past was gone. The future was a few signatures and a turn of a key away. And just like that, we were home.
I am a firm believer that in the course of a day we make hundreds of small unnoticed decisions that affect us, that change the direction of our path, but in the course of my life I have made a few substantial, recognized decisions that I consider to be the story of my journey. They are the choices I reflect back upon and think “what if…” They are the moments in my life where I paused to speculate the outcomes of my actions. They are the indicators of where things could have been different.
I cannot consider one without considering all those that preceded it. They are, after all, connected and sequential. One cannot exist without the one that came before it. That’s just how life is – moment after moment, event after event, choice after choice. Thinking about them today, for perhaps what is the first time, I can say without the slightest hint of doubt that I have no regrets about any of them. And it is because of this understanding that they are not isolated experiences, but rather, small incremental steps that have lead me to where I am now, here, in this space, writing these words in a room that is truly my own.
Of course there will always be “what ifs” because I am who I am and that’s how I look at the world. I will always wonder about that road not taken. I will dwell on the potential of what could have been – the positive as well as the negative. My junior year of high school we performed the musical ‘Working’ and one of the lines of the opening song was “if I could have been what I could have been, I could have been something.” It is a sentiment I carry with me in these recollections of the past. I still occasionally worry that I’ve wasted too much of my time, too much of myself, too much of the potential for who “I could have been” and now it is lost and gone forever. I fear those are things one can never get back.
But on days like today, days where I celebrate those leaps of faith, those hopes and the very sense that I have been and continue to be so hopeful, I find myself with a kind of comforting certainty that everything is just as it should be. The hot spring air wafts through my windows. The candle burns beside me. My roommate, my best friend, my sister is two doors down the hall undoubtedly reflecting on these same ideas. The world is quiet and still. My computer hums. My fingers tap on the keys. I write and write and write. And just like that, I am home.
