Chasing something?

If I lay here, if I just lay here.
Would you lie with me and just forget the world?
Snow Patrol

I like the song a lot; I can understand the feeling. Last week, this song woke me three different times. Not a good song to wake up to. For after I turned the alarm off, I rolled over and snuggled next to my wife. Could I just lie there? Let the world spin outside our door? It can wait. It’s so much better just lie there with my head next to hers, feel her warmth.
But of course I can’t. So I give her a little kiss on the cheek and say, “Good morning honey. It’s time to get up.”
She turns and looks at me through half opened eyes and smiles at me. A soft warm hug is shared, the world is still far away.

But the lines of the song haunt me on the dog walk. For I am not fully awake and my mind makes odd connections. One of those odd connections is to something an old friend of mine asked me almost two years ago. We were chatting on the phone and out of the blue she asked me-
“If I had asked you to marry me, would you have said yes?”
During the next two seconds, I had to jump back to a time long ago. I was what? Maybe nineteen? Twenty? How did I really feel about her?
“Yes, I would have.”
I don’t remember the next thing she said and the conversation shifted to something else.

But I felt a certain disquiet from her question, for it’s not something I ever thought about. When a relationship ends, it ends. You don’t sit and wonder about ‘might have been’, unless…

For you can endlessly wonder what would have happened if you asked the shy girl out? If you went left, not right? If she offered you a cup of coffee, instead of the glass of wine? All those times you made a choice, or a choice was made for you.

I haven’t thought much about what if’s, for my life has been good. And it continues to be good. All the choices I have made have lead me here, lying next to WG each morning, wishing the world would stay away for just a few more minutes, so I could enjoy just us.

The disquiet comes from the thought that my friend doesn’t might not feel the same as I, when she is lying next to her husband. I hope not, for I would like to think, hope, that she is as happy as I am.

And it would bother me immensely if I knew she was wondering if perhaps she should have asked me.