Time Capsule

When you're forty you'll realize it's twenty years too late to say the things you'd wished you said or do the things you'd wished you'd done. You wonder when your love letters and love poems made you blush and you decided to bury them at the bottom of the box of all the things you don't want to be discovered. At what moment did you condemn your unrepentant sentimentalism to the dimmest chamber of your heart?

You were spending a year in Europe when you fell in love with the quirky girl from, of all places, Minnesota. Big glasses and a mouse brown bob cut. She understood you, made you feel more important than anyone had before - one in seven billion - that's what she was. You fell in love in one afternoon, four short hours. But you were supposed to want the porcelain Danish doll or the French tart who was all eyelashes and lipstick. So you let her go, you were twenty and didn't realize she was one in seven billion, you didn't have enough experience to understand how unique she was. Maybe it wouldn't have led to anything but you'll never know. The things you'd wished you'd said, the things you'd wished you'd done - pointless now that you're forty.

When did you become just a passenger on a ship with a predestined course?