Don’t look at me like that, I see those pink cheeks when you talk about him,” she observed. “In my day, if I learned anything, it was to tell the ones you love how much love them. When I was your age, I fell in love with a beautiful woman. You know, fifties and all, I never told her, and she married a man that abused her terribly.” She paused, and Artemis could tell her eyes were dampening. “I went to her funeral two years after she moved away. In her things, there was a letter for me, telling me how much love she’d held in her heart and couldn’t speak. I was happy, my husband and my kids, but I always wonder, what woulda happened if I’d told her how much I loved her.” She smiled again. “Just don’t waste time, that’s what I’ll say. Call it old advice from an interfering old woman.
How I wish I could undo it all … take it all back…All those years I spent unhappy with him …. when I should have been looking for you.
How many times did we pass each other before we met? If only I’d known…. I would have searched for you endlessly.If only I’d found you before it was already too late.
At the end of the night they all seemed so happy. Maybe it was just because they hadn't seen each other in a while, but as they all gathered around hugging, kissing, and well-wishing each other, I found myself feeling for the first time in my life like maybe I'd missed out on something.
You know that old cliché about how millions of deaths being a statistic, while the loss of just one life is a tragedy? If that's true, what is it when you lose something that never even had a chance to be born? I've had a lot of relationships in my time, platonic or otherwise, but the ones I think about most are those that never quite made it to term. The dashing first date who didn't call you back. The lady on the train you had that amazing conversation with but never saw again. The cool neighbor kid you met the first time a week before he moved away. I guess I'm just haunted by all that potential energy. One moment, the universe presents you with this amazing opportunity for new possibilities and then...
[M]ost people go through life a wee bit disappointed in themselves. I think we all keep a memory of a moment when we missed someone or something, when we could have gone down another path, a happier or better or just a different path. Just because they're in the past doesn't mean you can't treasure the possibilities ... maybe we put down a marker for another time. And now's the time. Now we can do whatever we want to do.
What was on the other side?"Donna said, "He said there was another world on the other side. He could see it.""He... never went through it?""That’s why he kicked the shit out of everything in his apartment; he never thought of going through it, he just admired the doorway and then later he couldn’t see it at all and it was too late. It opened for him a few days and then it was closed and gone forever.