I Miss the Stories.

I regret the little things. (As some if not most neurodivergent people would say).

So much so that I’ve missed opportunities in grief of these small lost things, that by looking at the whole story seem irrelevant.

Forced to write this prompt I’ve suddenly forgotten all those moments, and I doubt my depressed mind could recall them now with these antidepressants coercing my mind to forget what makes me so sad. Which just makes me angry. I want to remember what I was so hung up on, so I could be mad at myself for regretting such insignificant things.

A ‘Would You Rather’ question is where my fascination with time traveling started. With hopes that some sort of glitch in the universe would spring me back to the past but still have the knowledge I have today.

All the things I’d do differently, the moments I’d appreciate just a little more, the hurt I could avoid, the questions I could answer about what I wanted to do with my life after school. I’d shout it out loud to everyone that could hear that “I would become a writer!”. And I’d be adamant and unmoved from my decision—that would save me a lot of my adult life from trying different things just to appease those around me.

All the things I want to peruse but had better chances at starting from a young age and so I never started. All these things that I wished with my whole body I could change, but nonetheless was stuck. I couldn’t go forward without wanting to go back.

For fun I started memorizing lottery numbers. There was one day where there was a particularly easy set of numbers I could make a tune too. (Ask me today, and I wouldn’t be able to recall). For months I had recited them, sometimes just to see if I could, and sometimes to play out the scene if I did fall into a worm whole to the past.

Of course I couldn’t tell everyone I was from the future (seeing as that could screw everything up) but as soon as my fantasy got to the part of how I’d greet each member of my family I suddenly (stupidly) realized that my grandfather dies in January of 2019. It would be due to chronic lung disease from his life as an immigrant worker being exposed to chemicals. Chronic meaning unavoidable. His was the first funeral I’d ever been too. The first corpse I’d ever seen. And here I was thinking of winning the lottery.

So what would I do? Which ship would I try to jump to that I’d missed?

The answer was easy by that point. I would ask him to tell me all the stories I never followed up on, and with living together I’d spend all my time with follow up questions.

There was this one story…Something to do with a tree?

It could’ve been a mango tree (or any tree with fruit honestly can’t remember which) from which his friends and him had climbed and stolen from when he was a kid looking for trouble in his village. They then had proceeded to galavant and enjoy their treasures, keeping an eye out for any sign of repercussions.

There were more. More stories. More ways for me to understand him, and possibly keep his memory alive. And now that I know what it means to write and read, I knew I should’ve listened more closely to his stories. For now they were lost, spoken once and now echoing to something infinitesimal in the universe, getting quieter every moment, getting further and further from my memory. Even if he had written anything down, I wouldn’t understand the script. For even though we both spoke the same language, I couldn’t read or write in it.

But the loss of his stories taught me one thing. All those small ships I passed? I shouldn’t be so hung up in them that I forget where the destination of my ship is headed. There’s no way to go back, so just be ready for what comes next.

Don’t be so bothered by passing ships that you forget where you’re headed.