Matthew, Cut it Out

 Yesterday I drove my own car to work instead of driving with Kevin so I could do some stuff afterwards. The song Hello by Adele played twice on the store’s overhead and then once on the car radio because I’d forgotten the hookup to listen to something on my phone. 

The song is appropriate a couple days after learning my first boyfriend passed away. “Hello from the other side, I must have called a thousand times. To tell you I’m sorry for breaking your heart.”  

Ughhhhh.  It’s an older song from a few years ago, why is it coming up so much now?  I did break his heart, but only because I was heavily pressured to  I was only approximately 20, and we were under a ton of pressure to only want careers and not families.  

Finally in the car, thank goodness I was alone because I said, “Matthew cut it out!”  

Then laughed at myself.  When that song first came out, I made fun of it, mostly because of this meme:

Then I said, “At least I never called a thousand times!”  

I think over the years we had two actual phone conversations and interactions in comments or online chatting, maybe about 8-10 times and never in person. 

(I’m talking about after we broke up circa 1998.  Of course when we were dating we were “in person all the time). 

On another note, some people believe that there are alternative universes with alternate timelines in which you made a different choice early on and therefore have a completely different life. Another hypothesis is that we have several timeline possibilities when we are born and they narrow down as we make certain choices. Which begs the question- what if he and I had stayed together?  His parents had four kids and he used to say he wanted at least four. My grandmother had 7, and I said I wanted 7. In reality, going our separate ways we each only had one. Would I be a widow with 7 kids now?  Or would we have stopped once we discovered he had cardiomyopathy?  Probably the latter. Back in those days, if you were a young woman, and you wanted a family, literally everyone demanded to know what you thought you’d do if he “died or left you”. There never was any actual constructive advice on what to do if those things happened. Just anger that we wanted the path they “fought so hard for” us not to go down. Only focus on your career, they all seemed to say. That can never go wrong. 

“What ifs” can be a black hole, especially when they involve partners and kids, because if you go down a different path in which you have kids with someone else, then your kids are other people. Think about your own parents- if they’d each married other people before you were born, which would your soul had been born as someone else to?  Your mom and the other guy or your dad and the other woman?  It’s a daunting black hole and I gotta go.