Regret's Greasy Bone

Have you ever seen someone, and in that moment, everything stopped except your heart spinning in your chest?

That is what happened last Sunday at 11:00am, standing in a crowd of people in Hyde Park Corner, waiting for the London walking tour to begin.

I’m standing there talking with my brother and his friend, looking at the sky, hoping it doesn’t rain, shuffling papers in my notebook, when I look up, and I see him.

Dark hair. Bright eyes. Soft smile. Angular jaw scruffed in 5 o’ clock shadow. Brown leather jacket.

That’s him. I have no idea who ‘him’ is; I just know that is him.

“Anna, run right up to him and say something. Run up to him right now or regret this moment.”

But I just stand there, watching him get his yellow ticket, lining up in the queue, being placed in the same tour group as me.

“This is your chance. Go up to him!”

But I don’t go up to him. I just go with the group.

And for the next three hours, I watch him in stolen glances, eyes flickering from tour guide to my notebook to him to some statue or building back to him. With each glance I feel the lost seconds slipping past, and I do nothing, chatting, smiling, talking to every person in the group except him. We make eye contact four times. We stand next to each other five times.

“Anna, what are you doing? Talk to him!”

Silence.

The tour ends outside Westminster Abbey. After a round of applause for Ed the tour guide and after paying our tips, the group begins dispersing. My brother, his friend, and I take a picture with Ed, and in the second before the camera flashes, I promise myself that when I turn around I will walk right up to that boy and talk to him. What will I say? I’ll decide when I get there.

Smile.

Click.

Flash.

I turn around, and standing in the green grass of Westminster Abbey, he is nowhere to be found. I rush to the sidewalk, looking right and left. I turn around, searching the courtyard. I go back to the street, scanning the other side, straining for a glimpse of a brown leather jacket.

Nothing. Gone.

I walk back to my brother and his friend, punching myself inside, regret burning my mouth, hot and bitter.

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was just a willed fantasy. But maybe, just maybe it was something.

We go to a pub for lunch, and sitting there, sipping my water, I let it go. Because what else can you do? But before I release it, I promise myself that if I ever see him again, then without hesitating or thinking twice, I will walk straight up to him and talk to him.

But there may never be a next time.

But if I met him once, then doesn’t that automatically increase my chances of meeting him again? These paths of life we walk are not straight lines. They are swerving, twisting highways, diving and intertwining in dizzying webs. And since our highways have crossed once, then they must be close-by, and even if they are heading in opposite directions, then they are at least connected now, and life has a way of pulling us full-circle.

If nothing else, it was a lesson learned, the only scrap of kindness given to us by regret.

At the meeting point for the London walking tour. Don't try looking for him. This picture was taken in one of the minutes before he arrived.