I've been thinking about you lately. You are the version of me that stayed — that didn't take the job in the other city, that didn't end that relationship when I did, that chose the path that I stood at for a long time before turning away.
I don't know what you look like now. Probably not very different. We share a face, after all, whatever different lives it has been through.
I wonder if you are happy. I wonder if the things I chose against turned out to be the things worth having, or whether you are, at this same moment, thinking about me — the other version, the one who left, who keeps moving, who has never quite stayed long enough in any place to leave a permanent mark on it.
We made different choices from the same position, which means we are, in whatever sense matters, the same person. We stood at the same crossroads with the same information and the same fears and we went in different directions. Both decisions were reasonable. Neither was wrong.
I want to tell you that I am okay, and I think you probably are too. I want to tell you that the path I took has had its own version of what you found on yours — its own specific quality of ordinary happiness, its own moments of doubt, its own small dignities.
I want to say: you were not the right choice and I was not the right choice. We were just the two available choices. And we have both, I think, made something of what we were given.
I hope your mornings are good. I hope the light comes through your window at a good angle. I hope you are writing.