I had an interesting dream last night. It was one of those dreams where it was so realistic that the little part of my brain that normally tells me that I'm asleep and dreaming wasn't speaking up. I was at my grandmother's house, and new people were moving in across the street from her. (My grandmother lives in a subdivision where all the houses were built in the 50s and 60s, and a good portion of them started out as ranch houses, but a lot of them have had second stories added.) The new neighbors were a young married couple with a baby boy. To my surprise, the husband was my ex-boyfriend.
This was the guy who had gotten me into programming. Before I met him, I didn't know what the Internet was. My family had had a computer since I was 5 (back when there were no hard drives and floppy disks were actually floppy), but I'd always considered it more of a toy than anything else. I played computer games on it, and typed my stories on it. It never occurred to me that I could make my own computer games, even though I knew that my uncle Norb had made the Hangman game that we had on our computer. David got me hooked up to the Internet and told me about the programming class he was taking at Catholic Central High School. That was when I decided that I wanted to be a games developer. I broke up with David just before our senior year of high school started, but my interest in computer programming continued--and look where I am today! I may be more of a geek than he is now.
I don't really know if I've ever regretted breaking up with David. He was my first infatuation, and seeing him (he works for Delta so I see him almost every time I fly out of Detroit Metro to visit my brother and his family in Atlanta) always raises conflicting, confusing emotions. I think that I made the right choice then and I don't think that I'd date him now if, for some bizarre reason, he asked me. Our world-views were different then and I doubt that they've grown more similar in the passing years. In high school, dating is a game that teenagers don't really understand. It's about status, prestige, and a lot of hormones. Well, it's about other things too, but mostly it's a lot of melodrama. Anyway, although I'm long over my infatuation with him, I've never really gotten any closure on our relationship. Will I always look at him and think "what if?", even though I know that a lot of those "what if"s depend on us having been different people?
Holding David's imaginary baby, looking into the baby's cherubic blonde-haired, blue eyed face, was very weird. The thought that went through my head was, "This could have been my kid." And I didn't feel any regret that it wasn't me moving into that house with David, and that it wasn't my son. It was, however, a poignant reminder of the lack of a significant-other in my life. All of my girl friends from high school are married now. One of them was pregnant but miscarried last year. Another is starting to talk with her husband about having children. I'm only 25, so I'd rather take my time finding the right guy than be married and divorced in less than a year like one of my friends from college. I can be happy by myself, without a husband and children, but there are times where it's very hard being single--like at other people's weddings. But that's another story.