Letters Between Timelines

By: Shruti Gupta

3rd year, B.A (Hons.) Sociology

What if, just for a moment, it’s okay to wonder?

Not in a way that aches for regret, but in the quiet sense of curiosity of looking sideways at your own life and thinking, Maybe there was another way I could’ve gone.

I think about her sometimes. The version of me who chose differently.

She’s sitting in a small studio apartment filled with scattered books and half-drunk coffee cups. There’s paint on her fingers, maybe a cat on the windowsill. She wakes up every day to the sound of traffic and chaos, but there’s something soft in her eyes like she’s living a life she chose, even if it’s hard.

She didn’t overthink it. She didn’t wait. She applied for that course. Took that train. Wrote that book. Held onto that person she let go of in this world. Or maybe she was the one who walked away because she knew it was time.

I wonder if she thinks of me too.

I don’t regret this version of my life. It has its own quiet moments, laughter echoing in unexpected places, people who stayed and choices I made out of both courage and fear. But I often wonder how things would feel if I had chosen differently. If I had leaned into uncertainty instead of comfort. If I had followed the thing that made my heart beat faster, instead of the one that made more “sense.”

Would I have been lonelier? Happier? Braver? Or just different?

Sometimes I close my eyes and try to reach her. Like if I listen closely enough, I’ll hear her humming a song I forgot. Or laughing at a joke I haven’t heard yet. She’s not better than me, not wiser or stronger. She just… chose another story….

And maybe that’s the point.

Maybe we are all multitudes of lives we could have lived, carrying echoes of them in the way we crave things we’ve never touched, places we’ve never been and people we’ve never met.

But today, I am here. And this version of me is still growing. Still learning to choose myself. Still figuring it out.

Still writing….

Maybe she is too !!!