#6 Summer of Grief — What If Things Had Gone Differently
Today I thought about the people I haven’t seen in a while. Some of my closest friends. My family. Most of them live far away now, in different cities, with different lives. I think it’s something a lot of us feel, this quiet distance that sneaks in as we get older.
When you’re in your early twenties — a student, or just freshly out of school — everything feels close. You live in the same city, sometimes even the same street. You meet up on weeknights, on weekends. You drink from the same bottle of wine or vodka, sleep in each other’s beds, knock on each other’s doors in the middle of the night, send a message and show up five minutes later. You know where everyone is, more or less.
But then, slowly, things begin to shift. People start to drift. They move to new cities. They move in with partners. They buy houses — or rent them, because not everyone can afford to buy. They start again. Quit jobs. Lose themselves. Fall in love. Break up. Hit that strange seven-year edge in long relationships — the part where everything starts to shake a little. You begin to ask yourself: do I stay, or do I leave? And neither option feels entirely right.
Somewhere in all of this, a kind of grief settles in. A quiet, shapeless grief for the things that might have been. The what ifs.
What if I’d never moved to Amsterdam to study; would I still be living in Antwerp now? What if my parents had stayed together; would I be the same version of myself, just with fewer wounds? What if I’d never messaged the person I’m with now; would I still be single? And would that really be so bad?
These questions visit me often. Daily, weekly, monthly. They’re the kind of thoughts you try to pack away in a box under your bed, hoping they’ll stay there. But eventually you lift the lid again, just for a moment, just to peek. And suddenly they’re everywhere again. Multiplying. Quietly following you around. And maybe that’s just part of it; learning to live with the questions. With the version of your life that exists, and all the parallel ones that don’t.
It’s a bit like listening to music from when you were a teenager, just to return to that exact moment for a while. To hold it, briefly, in your hands. How you felt back then. The choices you made that somehow led you here.
You hear songs from the days you felt utterly alone, lying on your bed staring at the ceiling, not knowing you'd ever find the right people — not knowing that one day the loneliness would soften. And then, suddenly, you’re listening only to joyful songs. Songs that make you feel alive. Songs that hold moments of euphoria. Until, of course, you fall out of love again, or grow apart from friends, or simply have to miss them because they’ve moved far away, and you find yourself wondering if you’ll ever love someone again, or have friends like you used to, those precious moments.
Because what if things had gone differently?
And no one really has an answer to that. Not a real one. Except maybe that this is what being human is — clumsy, tender, heartbreaking at times. The distance that creeps in between people is hard to understand, let alone accept. Once, you thought things would never change. That people would stay the same. And maybe, deep down, they do. But time changes. The world shifts. We grow, reluctantly or not, with the tide.
Grieving the what ifs — if you ask me — is perfectly okay.
P.S. Today I finally watched Blow-Up (directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) for the first time. And honestly, that’s not something I grief: the era when women were so openly objectified, chasing after men with cameras (?). It feels like a relic of a time we’re still unpacking, but also resisting. Watching it made me think about how much has changed, and yet how some things still linger beneath the surface. It’s a reminder of why reclaiming the gaze, rewriting the story, and finding new ways to see ourselves matters more than ever.
