Love Truths No. 6: Alternate Endings

I could have met you in a sandbox, I could have passed you on a sidewalk,
Could I have missed my chance, and watched you walk away?

- john mayer, love song for no one.

We used to go on these wonderful night trips to restaurants on Sunday nights. The whole family would pack into Pa's hand operated car and then take a slow drive to our destination. Radio 4 and its host of evening deejays would play the classic favourites, as we sat in silence and allowed the music to carry us.

"So tell me, Pa," I broke the silence one evening. "Was there someone else before Mum?"

Pa smiled, and he hesitated for only the slightest moment before saying, "Yeah, there was this one girl who I liked."

"I would cycle to her place and then stand outside her house and call her name. Her Dad would then come out, this angry looking bah-gger. I would walk into her house and then she would come to sit in the living room with me."

"The bah-gger of a father would just sit in the corner and then stare at me as if I was going to steal something from the house."

"Of course, it didn't last very long lah with the father like that. Man, if I came to the house in a car instead of a bicycle, the bah-gger wouldn't have been sitting there in that corner watching me like a hawk. Hahaha!"

Pa can afford to end with a laugh now in a way he couldn't have all those years ago.
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One day we were cleaning up the house when we stumbled upon a card that was addressed to Mum. It had flowers in the front, and had yellowed with age. The writing was in Mandarin and indecipherable to us, but we showed it to Mum and she decoded it with a sigh.

"He used to like me, you know," Mum said. "He was from my Form Six class, and he used to like me a lot. Too bad I was such a shy girl and I didn't know how to respond to him."

"He went off to study in London and then stayed on there to work I think."

"Things could have been so different," she said wistfully. Her whole life unfolded before her in her mind's eye, here this instant - If only I had said yes, if only he were a bit more forward, I wonder what London would have been like, I wonder what he would have been like - and gone the next.

She closes the card again, and with it, whole alternate universes are destroyed.

"Well, at least you have us three wonderful children," we console her cheekily, inflating ourselves in the process.

"Yes, I do," she smiles.
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The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness. - alain de botton, essays in love.