Regret

To H

I dreamt about you this morning, just before waking, probably because I was on co-codamol for my extraction and sleeping quite soundly for once - we  met by accident attending for interviews for an MA course sometime in the mid 80s. I was conscious in the dream of somehow being aware that it was 2009 and 1984-ish at the same time.

It doesn't need much interpretation - I'd been thinking yesterday about how well-matched you and P are in life experience and status, and in the dream my mind was imagining the last time you and I might have been more or less equals.

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Almost immediately after waking I remembered how I started playing truant at secondary school. On the afternoon we were supposed to register for Games (I hated Games and PE) I was sent instead to accompany another lad to hospital who had broken his arm. I never registered and was able to skip Games every Wednesday afternoon. From then on I realised I could skip any lesson I disliked or in which there were problems, and I truanted from many classes for the next two years, until I failed all but two of my O Levels and had to re-take them all at 6th form along with "A" Levels.

Up to that point my life was going relatively normally. If I had to name a point when I took the wrong track, that afternoon was it, or more accurately the next games day, when I should have registered myself rather than truanting, was it.

It's not that I'd forgotten this event, more that I realised today what a pivotal point it was in my life. It was the moment when I chose to retreat rather than deal with things. I could have changed the path many times over the following decades, but I didn't, and a time comes in every life when things have gone too far wrong to be put right. I probably reached that point 5 years ago when I began to feel like I do now.
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Another useless insight because it doesn't change my life now and can't bring back all the lost time, experience, and opportunity.

But then again, my deep sense now is that nothing can put my life right or onto any track I would want it to be on.

Which, if I'm open, is an acceptance that my life is over.


B
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