Ultimately, your relationships from grade school will always be what they were. Years go by and you happen chance to cross paths with someone you knew once upon a time. Maybe they are someone you paled around with.  Maybe it’s someone who bullied you.  Maybe it’s someone you were, and still are, deeply madly in love with.  And the two of you tentatively reestablish a link between you.  And maybe you both decide not to let the past happen again.  You’re both grown up now.  Things will be better this time.  And for a time they are.  And then, slowly but it seems inevitably, you both fall back into the old patterns of behavior.  It feels like you are trapped in a time warp, no matter what you both do.  And perhaps in a sense that’s what it is.

It’s like the time travel paradox. Say you have powerful regrets about events in your past…so you invent a time machine, so you can go back in time and change what happened.  Maybe it’s something you regret doing, or that was done to you.  Maybe it’s a chance you wish you had taken.  So you invent your time machine and go back in time and you fix that thing you have wanted to fix all these years.  But now the present stops being what it is and so you live your life with no powerful regret, and no need to go back in time and change anything.  And so you don’t invent that time machine after all, and you don’t go back in time…and so nothing gets changed after all…

The universe does not permit paradoxes like that to happen.  Somehow, someway, however it must, time will not allow itself to be mucked with.  It isn’t about you.  The universe does not care about you.  It doesn’t care about your regrets, about your wounds, about all the chances you never took.  All it cares about is its rules are never broken, it’s mechanical structure never breached.   The laws of time and space are what they are and they don’t give a good goddamn about you.  Time must flow…perfectly…

I have a theory: Whenever you reconnect with that old school friend, or pal, or enemy, or crush, you are going back in time and your attempts to change that relationship will inevitably be defeated. Because time won’t let you do that. The physical universe just works that way.

And if you can’t move on, then just let it be.  You endured that regret all this time, you can live with it a little longer.  Maybe.