The diary of almost everything

One of the advantages of not believing in God is that you’re generally spared the awkward business of interpreting signs from the universe.

Until, apparently, you’re not.

A couple of months ago I confidently announced, to both myself and anyone patient enough to listen, that I was done repeating old mistakes. Not in a dramatic I’ve completely changed my life sort of way, but in the quieter sense that I’d finally reached the age where I could recognise certain patterns before enthusiastically walking straight back into them.

One of those patterns involved men from my past. Especially the ones who were charming, slightly unavailable and had always possessed just enough confidence to make questionable decisions look oddly attractive.

I decided that chapter was closed.
Then I walked into the supermarket.

It was one of those ridiculously hot afternoons where everyone looks as though they’re slowly melting into the tarmac. Halfway through my shopping I caught someone in the corner of my eye and recognised him immediately. Almost twenty years had passed, yet somehow my brain still knew his face before it had processed the fact that it was seeing him again.

My first thought wasn’t I wonder how he’s been. It was Thank goodness my hair looks decent today.

Which was mildly disappointing. After twenty years I’d hoped I’d evolved into someone whose first concern would be world peace or whether I’d remembered to buy oat milk. Apparently there are limits to personal growth.

Feeling far braver than I actually was, I called out his name. He looked at me, spent a second searching through two decades of memories and then smiled with that unmistakable expression of I know exactly who you are now.

We exchanged a few sentences before I escaped towards the checkout, quietly congratulating myself for surviving the encounter without making a complete idiot of myself.

I assumed that was the end of it.

Years ago I’d tried looking him up out of nothing more than curiosity, the way everyone occasionally wonders what happened to someone who once occupied far too much space in their teenage brain. He wasn’t on social media, so I’d accepted that some people simply disappear into ordinary life.

Before leaving the supermarket I remember thinking that if he ever somehow wandered back into my life, I’d know exactly what to do.

Nothing.

I’d promised myself I wasn’t going back to old patterns. I’d finally learned that there is a considerable difference between enjoying someone’s attention and wanting the life that comes with them, and those lessons had been expensive enough the first time around.

A few weeks later I was sitting on the beach with a friend when my phone buzzed.

Unknown number… “Hi Sophie.” I asked who it was and he told me.

I looked at my friend, pointed dramatically at the sky and said, “This is a test from God.”
Which was particularly inconvenient, because I don’t even believe in God.
Apparently disbelief lasts right up until life develops a sense of humour.

He explained that he’d been clearing out his phone when he stumbled across my number, which, somewhat unbelievably, had apparently been sitting there for almost twenty years. 

I’d completely forgotten that I’d been dragging the same mobile number from one contract to the next for what now feels like several geological eras. My immediate reaction wasn’t even How nice that he texted me.
It was:
Good grief… who else still has my number from twenty years ago?

My friend found the whole situation considerably funnier than I did. She announced that this was exactly how every bad romantic comedy starts and generously offered to remind me of all the sensible things I’d said only weeks earlier.
Fortunately, I didn’t need much reminding.
We started chatting, and within about twenty minutes I realised something rather comforting.

He hadn’t really changed.
He was still funny, still easy to talk to and still very much the same man I’d known all those years ago. Which also meant he was still carrying exactly the same collection of red flags I’d noticed back then, only now I was old enough to recognise them before convincing myself they were decorative.
Oddly enough, that made everything much easier.

At one point I simply told him where I stood. I said I genuinely enjoyed talking to him, I’d happily have a drink one day and catch up, but I wasn’t interested in anything casual. I’d finally reached the point where I knew that arrangement simply wasn’t for me anymore.

I expected the conversation to become awkward the moment I said it, but instead he laughed and told me I should always do whatever felt right for me. There was no attempt to change my mind, no clever persuasion and none of the games I’d secretly been preparing myself for. It turned into one of the easiest conversations I’d had in years.

Driving home later, I realised something that had nothing to do with him.
Twenty years ago I’d have measured that conversation by whether he liked me.
This time I measured it by whether I liked the person I was while having it.
For perhaps the first time, those turned out to be two completely different questions.
It’s funny how growing up rarely looks the way you imagine.

I used to think maturity would arrive with certainty, confidence and all the right answers. Instead, it seems to arrive the day you stop negotiating with your own boundaries.

So perhaps it wasn’t a test from God after all. But if it was…
I passed.

-Sophie Quinn