it feels like for a brief moment, we slipped into another dimension in which that was our life, a parallel world existing simultaneously as the one we are currently living here

we were those people and we are also these people which I guess means that we are so many different people living somewhere else right at this very moment

like the life I have here and the person I am here is just one beautiful version but now that I've peeked in through a window into this alternate life, it has swung open the door to a million other lives and avenues and dreams and desires

like some part of me is still there and hasn't made it back yet

like this isn't the me that's supposed to be here and the me that's there is the wrong one
maybe we are both mourning the other "right" life

like I should be sitting dizzy along the Boston harbor, a cool breeze and soft hazy light washing over me, my hands in my coat pockets and your head on my shoulder, a small smile at the corner of my lips, laughs loaded in the chamber, because everything feels so perfect that there is no way any other place in the world exists outside of that moment

and she should be sitting here, along the bay, watching the red sun set over the gulf, listening to the familiar song of the water lapping the rocks below, taking her ritual stroll of coming back into herself, and her home is quiet but not for long because she's counting down the minutes until the moment he walks in the door with open arms and an excited hello

both of these people exist but they can't together, and to accept one is to deny the other and neither feels fair or good or
right

and in that realization it is impossible to not think about all of the decisions that led to this life and not that one or any other one and how by chance, I ended up here but could have just as easily ended up anywhere else and that discovery is too big to settle into over a three hour flight and fourteen hundred miles because

somewhere I am sitting in a park in Rome, fingers sticky from eating peaches next to my best friend in the grass, and somewhere,

I am dancing on a frozen lake in Bar Harbor with rosy cheeks and bright eyes, and somewhere

I am back home, wandering the streets of the french quarter after a few glasses of red wine and a soft saxophone fills the silence in the distance and my parents are only an hour away and somewhere,

I am riding a bike through the cemetery as spring brings pink blossoms to the trees in Tallahassee and I never left

and I never met any of you

and these are the people that I always have been, always will be, never was, and never will be again