The Dream Of Being Better

When you can’t sleep at night and you lay very still thinking about the stupid things you’ve done and said you sometimes let yourself fantasize about what it would be like if you could go back into the past and put yourself in a different position. “If I had only made a better choice at this moment — or even no choice at all — everything would be okay now,” is what you let yourself believe as your brain unspools an alternate reality in which all your actions were good ones. But then the same little voice that is keeping you awake in the first place pipes up and says, “Yes, but remember the bad thing you did before that?” And so you’ve got another event that you mentally undo, and the satisfaction that comes with imagining how things would all be okay if you did that one right lasts for a little bit until an even earlier misstep emerges from your memory. Eventually the dawn breaks, you haven’t slept in hours, and you understand the only way to have kept yourself from all the heartless, hurtful acts you’ve spent your selfish life committing would be to have never been born in the first place. Then you realize that never having been born in the first place is the only dream you have. But it’s impossible. You can’t turn back the clock that far. You can’t even turn it back a little. Except for this weekend, when you turn it back an hour. Try not to fuck that up that way you’ve fucked up everything else, okay?

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