The What-If Collection
Our first issue takes you down the many paths an evening could have taken. If only
Greetings dear dreamers
Welcome to the very first issue of the Abandoned Dreams Collective.
There is a word in hindi that occupies a special place in my heart.
Kaash
It translates to ‘if only’. (all my friends are probably rolling their eyes at me right now. I see you).
For as long as I remember, I’ve been making up stories of alternate realities. When there’s still a chance, I’ll dream about how its supposed to happen. When I’ve squandered all my chances, the stories will be about what it could have been. Words left unsaid. Gestures that would have brought it on track. For years I’ve lived in and out of this space of what almost was within reach. If only. I’ll go there when I’m staring out the window on the bus, when I’m trying to understand a particularly complicated paragraph about meiosis in my biology text book, when I’m trying to lull myself to sleep. I tell these stories to people in my life as if its all real because to me it is. It almost happened. It would have been real, if only.
When you’re told you need to move on, need to open yourself to other possibilities, that this wasn’t the only world for you, there’s always a sense of loss. Where does this world that I created and all the ways I furnished it go when I move away? Who’s going to take care of it?
A few months ago I decided to create a place for all those pieces - mine and others’, to call home. Today I’m sharing my own and will be welcoming in 5 more over the course of the upcoming weeks.
The What-If Collection
v1.0
When I get home from what I’m going to look back on forever as the best date of my entire life, I disregard the advice I got from my best friend about how I shouldn’t jump the gun and wait for him to text me first the way he said he would.
I shoot off a text as soon as I get home
“fwiw, I really wish I’d said yes. I freaked out a little about it being too much too soon”
v2.0
The text message I should have sent the second day instead of ‘being chill about the whole thing’:
Okay I know this is kinda crazy and potentially really stupid.
I’m trying not to overthink this.
I want to see you again before you go back to Jakarta. Today. I don’t care if its just ten minutes. I don’t care if its just two. I don’t care if its only long enough to utter the word hi.
I don’t know if this is too much.
My condo is only a short detour on your route to the airport. Could you stop by?
If that’s inconvenient, I’ll come wherever you are - to the hotel to watch you pack or wait in the lobby and take the twenty minutes cab ride to airport or just show up to the airport to catch a glimpse of you leaving and reassure myself that last night did really happen and that you’re real. Then I’ll leave.
Just let me have something.
I can’t let this feeling haunt me forever.
v3.0
It's past closing time and he and I are the last people to leave. Going down the escalators from the rooftop bar is like being woken up from a dream of iridescent skies and chamber pop lilts. We now make small talk almost sheepishly, not really knowing how it goes now, not knowing if we were supposed to be feeling this way, not knowing what to say to each other.
In this reimagined version of events, I don’t hesitate or wait until we get to the point of no return the way I did the first way around. As we step off the escalator into the unlit courtyard, I stop in my tracks and face him. I proceed to ask him the most redundant question that was ever asked at 1:30 am at the end of a date. “Hey...do you have anywhere else you have to be right now?”.
If he hasn’t yet taken the atmospheric cues and kissed me, I ask him if he’ll come with me to the beach. A neutral ground in my eyes: uncomplicated and devoid of dangerous escalations and perilous messes. I’m going to assume he says yes immediately.
And so we go.
I ask him if he’s okay with his clothes getting a little soiled and once he says yes, impressed at me suggesting it, we sit on the rock formation I walk to every morning. By starlight we continue our conversation from earlier, now letting our guards down even more. Making candid confessions. Sitting closer together, his arm around my shoulders, my head against his chest. Hesitations and baggage more transparent and easier to delve into. No eyes being self-consciously averted in the fear of being ‘too much’ anymore. This is the real deal. Deep thoughts, difficult revelations, dumb jokes. Talking and then not talking. Breathing in and out, loud heartbeats as comfortable friends rather than daunting deterrents. The hard conversations, the things we can’t say while sitting across from someone in a room full of talking strangers, the things we’re afraid to ask but dying to know are easier to voice because at that moment it feels like the two of us are an extension of each other - teammates in the game, taking on everything together.
We remain there until the sun starts to rise and the last of the glimmering stars are replaced by purple-pink-orange skies. Asking him to walk back to my place doesn’t seem as unnerving in the morning light now that he knows me and I, him. This is how the story begins.
v4.0
At some point before our cabs arrived, before he had the chance to say anything, I decide to call my own bluff. I look him straight in the eye and in a no holds barred tone say:
“Look. I know the drill. This isn’t my first rodeo but this is nothing like the others I’ve been to. I’m very familiar with everything that can go wrong. I know you travel all the time and live in a different country and are too busy to be constantly responsive over text. Fuck all that. More important than that I know that regret is a bitch. I know that wanting this despite knowing all of that is supposed to mean something. I don’t know anything about what else or who else you have going on. I want to know all that, I want to know everything about you and I want to know if you want to give this a shot too. Make it work. Not take it as it goes. Not waste it. Not lose it. All in.”
V5.0
I don’t want the kiss we stole moments before our respective cabs arrived to end but it does. I don’t want him to ask the question where it all starts to spool apart but he still does.
If I’m being completely honest, that’s a lie.
I needed him to have asked it because that’s one thing I have that suggests that I wasn’t the only one affected by the electricity that encircled us like we were in a Disney movie. I guess what I really wish is for myself to have answered that question differently, to have actually answered it, to have not bypassed it the way I did. I say I like you and I want to but all of this was too much too soon. He got it. He felt the same way. He’d asked only because he didn’t want ambiguity when we parted.
V6.0
When he asks me if I want to come back with him, I squeeze the hand that’s still intertwined with mine, smile ruefully and confess “I want to. I really do. But I’m terrified”. I take in a deep breathe and exhale. “Issues”, I add by way of explanation, offering none yet. I kiss the corner of his mouth to emphasize that I really do want this to continue. I blurt out impulsively “Wait, give me a second! Can I explain in your cab? Don’t move please”
I take the absence of a pull away as silent affirmation and give the hand another squeeze for good measure. Detangling myself from his embrace gently, I walk over to the cab I’d booked for myself, the one whose arrival had signalled the end of the moment that only seconds ago had enveloped us in an intoxicating haze. I mumble a quick apology, passing along a $10 note for the driver’s troubles.
This short walk has done nothing to calm my nerves and my heartbeat is still racing when I reach his side once again, suddenly feeling like I’ve been gone an age and a half.
He slides in after me into his cab, not sure of what to make of any of the last few minutes. For a few seconds as the roads speed by, all I’m able to do is stare down at my hands. I’m not good at this kind of conversation. Or any conversation really, if I’m going to be completely honest. I’ve never actually had an open conversation of the kind this is supposed to be and I feel woefully inept for the task.
In a tone forcibly light, as if asked about a sitcom gag at gunpoint, I take a stab at conjuring up words. “I don’t want to fuck shit up before even knowing if there’s shit here that can be fucked up. Its too early for any of that.” I roll my eyes at myself “But it already feels like I’m fucking up because I’ve now made it weird and awkward and intense”. I try starting again. “See, the easiest way to address it is to call it baggage. I guess I have baggage. The kind that makes this part that’s supposed to be easy and fun and natural, messy and complicated. Honestly, I don’t know where to start or even what I want you to say. I just want to have not ruined whatever potential there was here”.
He reaches out to take my hand and squeezes it. Its going to be okay.
V7.0
Covid never became what it has. The way we left things wasn’t an ending because he was able to fly back to my city the following month. We had late night conversations about the most ludicrous sounding ideas we had and the world we wanted to create and I gifted him the book of short stories written by that girl I follow on twitter and got him addicted to Taylor Swift and he helped me see that I could really get that job I wanted and sent me all the memes in his phone gallery and we flew to Bali for my birthday and got plants together to name after our inside jokes and we got it right.
I look forward to seeing you again next week with a new story.
Much love and many dreams
Nirmitee
The Abandoned Dreams Collective
I loved it. So relatable with the too much too soon aspect. I feel this so hard. Thanks for sharing!