“Remember how it was when we were young? It was like a dance, couples pairing up, together one month, the next everybody has a new partner, sometimes from within your social circle, other times a stranger brought in, but there was always this ebb and flow, like a tide, as though dating and love were a game of musical chairs, except you played it with your heart.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that we seem to divide into two camps: the ones who keep a partner and settle down, maybe have kids, maybe buy a house; and the ones who stay in the musical-chairs dance and end up living on their own, who are on their own for longer and longer periods of time until they grow to like their solitary lifestyle—or at least accept it. Some keep a hope buried for that certain someone to fall into their lives, but nobody’s really looking anymore. Or they’re not looking hard.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when that happens.

For me, hope runs eternal, even though my relationships never really work out in the long run. Maybe I set my sights too high. Maybe I’m just hopeless. I don’t know. Or maybe I just never met the right woman, for all the times I thought I did.

Or maybe I did meet the right woman, but I never knew it, and went out with her sister or her friend instead.
Or maybe I did know it, but I told myself it was never going to work out…”

Excerpt from Widdershins, by Charles de Lint. Caught my eye while I was randomly browsing in the Borders bookstore yesterday. Displacement, a feeling of why-am-I-here when everybody-else-is-there, not just in terms of geographical or even emotional distance, but instead, how does one measure distance and different degrees of openness, of possibilities, between the paths we all walk called life? Some roads are more well travelled, more comforting because the road is already more or less chosen for us. Some are confusing, but perhaps also exciting, because most of the possibilities ahead are not closed down yet. Compare it to a situation where you are lost in the city. Do you panic, because you are not sure any longer where you are, where to go? Or do you relish the feeling of being lost in the moment, now that all paths are open for exploration again?