Redux

Last night I had a nightmare. That's an event, because I never have nightmares. I never dream of monsters coming from the bed or people dying or anything like that. All of my dreams are pleasant, or at the very worst boring.

But last night I dreamed I went back and relived my sophomore year in college. That's the year of my first real regret. But in the dream everyone knew that I was reliving that year and kept coming to me to find out what happened next, and all of the information I gave them was dull stuff. Like: "...and then we had lunch over there..." sort of crap that. All the stuff that people are barely interested in the first time around, let alone reliving.

Still, even after I woke up this morning I was still in the dream. I was plotting on how I would do things differently, what I would say at key moments. So much of what happened in the following five years, if not the rest of my life, stem from a handful of significant moments from that year. I'd recount the details here, but they're not important. They're gone if not forgotten.

It's interesting how something that happened more than twenty years ago can seem more important than anything that happened yesterday.

So, I've decided that for today I'm going to act as if I'd played those key moments differently. I'm going to rewrite history. The moments I'm talking about aren't significant to anyone but me, and the other people involved are no longer part of my life, so I'm just going to pretend they didn't happen the way they actually happened and see how my life would be different.