The person I almost became

I found a old photograph in a folder I had almost thrown waya whole I was cleaning my room. It was an ordinary picture.

I was younger and standing beside a college campus I never attended and holding a admission letter for a course I never joined. I remembered that version of my life.

I had been accepted. I had imagined the classroom and the people I would meet and the city that I might live in and the person I might become there.

Then something changed. I chose differently.

At that time it felt like one decision. Looking at the photograph years later I realised that it has been the beginning of an entirely different life.

For the rest of the day I decided to follow that alternate version of myself. Not literally. Not in my imagination.

I imagined waking up in that city. I imagined taking the same route to the college that I took everyday. I imagined having friends that I have beer met and sitting in classroom I had never entered and learning things I had ever studied.

Perhaps I would have become confident. Perhaps I would have fallen in love. Perhaps they would have chosen me and stayed. Perhaps I would have failed completely. That was th strange part.

I had always imagined my alternate life as better. But the more I thought about it the more I realised that I have only thought about the highlights. I was not imagining the loneliness. The financial problems my parents would be facing in my absence. The wrong decision. The friendship that might have ended. The oppertunity I have missed there.

I was comparing my real life with all its disappointments to an imaginary life where I have been able to remove all my problems.

If course my imagination looked better. I spend the rest of the day thinking about all other people I could have become.

The person who chooses a different career. The oersonwho moved to a different city. The person who said no instead of yes. The person who said yes instead of no.

But they all are imagination. This version is real. This version where I have struggled and adapted and lost and learned and continued. May be I don't know whether the other life could have been better. I will never know.

And perhaps that is not the the point. A life cannot be measured my imaginary onem I did not because the person I imagined. I because the person that I have made myself according to the things I saw in life.