Sliding Doors + Micro Regrets
One July day in 2005, I poured myself a glass of cold Diet Coke and grabbed my copy of the hottest release of the summer, Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince. I met my sister on the front porch of our family’s house. There was a gorgeous rug on the ground, some comfy outdoor furniture, and one of those vintage Coca-Cola coolers were stocked full of sodas to get us through the afternoon. She was further ahead of me in the book, which was annoying because we had both got the book at midnight the prior evening.
It was such an amazing day… that never happened. That’s because in the late ’80s my father decided to turn the external porch on our family’s home into a closed porch. He put up walls, and a ceiling, and windows and it became an indoor space. We used the space throughout our childhood as a playroom, then a computer room, and most importantly, the Christmas tree room.
But man, how nice it would have been to have that outdoor space! It was on the second floor, so we’d get a bird’s eye view of the street and some privacy. Sure, we had a back porch… and a backyard... but A FRONT PORCH? That’s the dream, man.
Every now and then, I think about the lives I could have lived if I had made slightly different choices. Not major life changes, like I wrote about in this post, but VERY small things that would have barely impacted my life.
Like, what if I picked the Melrose Square apartment last month rather than the Malden one I chose? What would that life have looked like? It had so much space and a weird attic with two huge rooms! What would I have done in those rooms??? Arts?? Crafts?? (I’d probably use it as Christmas storage.)
What if I ordered the amatriciana pasta during Easter dinner instead of the butternut squash ravioli???
What if I chose the Peanuts checks rather than Scenes from Small Town America??!?!
My friend Marty once called his mother while we were in Las Vegas. The night before was his birthday and we went to a French restaurant on the strip. Marty ordered soup and dropped his phone in it. Upon telling this to his mother, she said without hesitation, “Well why didn’t you get a salad?”
Why didn’t Marty get a salad? If he had only made a slightly different choice, his evening would have been mildly improved by the fact that his phone wasn’t submerged in hot French onion soup.
Would his life have significantly improved? No. In fact, nothing even happened to his phone and it was hilarious. However, the small choices we make each day could make the tiniest of impacts. On Easter, maybe I would have eaten the leftovers of the pasta, rather than throw them out like I did the butternut squash ravioli. Or maybe I would have finished the whole portion at the restaurant and made myself sick! That day could have ended so many different ways!
Every day, we make hundreds of decisions. Some of us poll several friends to make sure we’re making the right one, while others just fly by the seat of their pants and put little-to-no thought into our decisions (that one is me.) Should I be worrying more about whether I’m making the right or wrong decisions? What if I’m seriously screwing with my life by not carefully considering every choice?
In a bigger, more serious way, I often wonder about the bigger decisions. I feel tiny pangs of longing at times for what could have been. I feel especially sad about the decisions that were made out of fear. I was too afraid to go away for college, so I didn’t. I moved to Los Angeles partially because I already had friends there. What else have I sacrificed simply because I was too afraid or it was too much work?
Every time we open a door, we close another one. I’ve learned the hard way that spending any time regretting decisions isn’t worth it. That’s why I got a tattoo that says, “No regrets!” Just kidding. It says, “non je ne regrette rien” which is the title of an Edith Piaf song and literally translates to, “No, I regret nothing” which makes the tattoo even weirder. My other lives could have been pretty cool, but this one is too. There’s no other life available to me than the one I have right now, so looking back and having regrets is pointless.
All I know for sure is that I will never enclose an open porch, or order the soup over a salad. I know how those stories end, and they’re not pretty.