Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda… Bloody Well Didn’t, Did I?

That old chestnut. The do-over. The “if only”. The “if I knew then what I know now”. Well, yes. If I had known then what I know now, I would have known it. Very useful. I also wouldn’t have had the body I have now, the cynicism, the collection of mistakes, or the uncanny ability to recognise certain varieties of bullshit before they have finished introducing themselves.

So let’s make this fair. Put yourself back at the precise moment you are forever revisiting and play it again. But you don’t get to go back as you are now. That’s cheating. You go back as you were. Same age. Same insecurities. Same ridiculous optimism. Same hormones. Same information. Same people whispering in your ear. Same things you believed about yourself and the world that you now know were complete bollocks.

Now tell me what you would have done differently. No, really. Would you have left? Stayed? Said yes? Said no? Kissed him? Not kissed him? Taken the job? Made the call? Refused the apology? Accepted it? Would you genuinely have recognised that enormous flashing warning sign for what it was, or would you once again have admired the pretty colour?

I challenge you to walk that route in unbridled, naked honesty and see where you end up, because memory is a terrible liar. It adds flattering lighting. It removes the boring bits. It improves everybody’s hair. The silences become meaningful. The sex becomes better. The things we should have said become devastatingly clever and perfectly timed, and the dialogue ends up somewhere between Pulp Fiction and Sense and Sensibility. Nobody remembers saying, “Sorry, what?” three times because the kettle was boiling. We edit the past until it becomes something that never actually happened, and then we grieve for it.

There are no do-overs. This seems monstrously unfair, considering how many things I would like to do over, preferably with access to Google, a lawyer, and the ability to occasionally slap my younger self. But there is that wonderfully dangerous little question we keep tucked away for quiet moments when apparently we haven’t suffered enough: what if?

I’ll give you an example. A woman in her fifties meets up with her first love, who has also somehow had the audacity to become a man in his fifties. We’re talking first love. Sixteen. Blushing. Holding hands. The sort of love where fingers touching under a table could cause cardiac arrhythmia and anything beyond that was anathema to good morals. Or at least officially. We were sixteen, not dead.

They loved each other in that enormous way you can when you are young enough not to know what love will eventually be required to survive. Nobody had discussed money. Nobody had been awake for three nights with a sick child. Nobody had disappointed the other one for the four-hundredth time. Nobody had discovered that this person apparently chews like that. It was love before life got hold of it, and then life did.

They went their separate ways. Other people arrived. Other loves. Other beds. Careers. Marriages perhaps. Children perhaps. Divorces. Deaths. Bad decisions. Good decisions that turned bad. Bad decisions that somehow turned out rather well. Whole lives accumulated between those two sixteen-year-olds who once thought holding hands was practically pornography.

Then, decades later, they meet again. And there he is. Except he isn’t. The boy she remembers is nowhere to be found. There is a man sitting opposite her who has his face, or an older version of it, and perhaps the same laugh, perhaps some familiar gesture that suddenly collapses forty years into four seconds. And she isn’t there either. The sixteen-year-old girl he remembers has been through some shit. This is precisely when “what if?” pulls up a chair and orders something expensive.

What if they had stayed together? What if she had said something? What if he had? What if one decision had gone the other way? What if they had married? Had children? Grown old together? What if this was the great love story interrupted by circumstance, and they were actually supposed to have spent all those missing years together? Lovely. Or perhaps they would have been divorced by twenty-seven and spent the next thirty years avoiding one another at mutual friends’ weddings. Nobody puts that version in the fantasy.

That’s the scam. When we imagine the life we didn’t live, we give it every possible advantage. We take the best imaginary outcome and compare it with the grubby, complicated, occasionally catastrophic reality of the life we did live. Of course, fantasy wins. The match is fixed.

The marriage that never happened never had money problems. The children you never had never developed their own problems. The career you didn’t choose never bored you senseless. The country you left never disappointed you. The person you didn’t marry snored, cheated, sulked, changed, stopped touching you, stopped understanding you, or became somebody you would cross Pick n Pay to avoid. Nothing went wrong because nothing happened, yet we can still spend years mourning it.

That is the part I find fascinating. Perhaps sometimes we aren’t missing the person at all. Perhaps we’re missing ourselves. The person we were when that possibility still existed, before life started shutting doors behind us simply because we had walked through other ones.

At sixteen, there are hundreds of possible versions of you waiting in the wings. At fifty-something, quite a few have been killed off. Not tragically. Just practically. You cannot simultaneously marry him and not marry him. Leave and stay. Have the child and not have the child. Get on the plane and remain standing at the gate. Every choice costs you all the choices you didn’t make.

And here’s where the whole do-over fantasy gets properly inconvenient: change one thing, and you don’t get to choose what happens afterwards. You don’t get to say, “I’ll remove that disastrous relationship, please, but I’d like to keep the friend I met because of it.” You can’t erase the terrible job, but you can retain the person you met there. You can’t undo the move, but you can keep everything that happened because you moved. You cannot pull one thread out of a life and expect the rest of the jumper to remain intact.

So when I hear myself thinking, “If only I had known,” I have started asking a nastier question: known what? And how exactly was I supposed to know it before I had lived the thing that taught it to me?

That doesn’t make every mistake worthwhile. Some mistakes are just mistakes. Some people really should have been avoided. Some doors should absolutely have remained shut, preferably locked, bolted, and guarded by large dogs. I refuse to turn suffering into a Hallmark card merely because it happened.

But I also refuse to pretend that the woman I am today could have been parachuted backwards into the life of the girl I was then. She wasn’t available yet. I had to be her first: the one who got things wrong, trusted people she shouldn’t, occasionally stayed when she should have left, and left when perhaps she should have stayed, said things she regretted, and failed to say things she regretted even more.

Would I do it differently? Some of it, certainly. But if you put me back there without everything I learnt afterwards, would I? That is a very different question, and I’m not remotely sure I like the answer.

Coulda. Woulda. Shoulda. Didn’t.

The past is closed, but we can waste an astonishing amount of the present trying to renegotiate it. Perhaps that is the real danger of “what if?” Not that we occasionally wander back and wonder how things might have turned out, but that we become so enchanted by the life we never lived that we fail to notice the one still happening.

And unlike the past, this one still has choices in it.