Writing Prompt: Tell Us About a Door You Almost Walked Through
It can be fun to think about what might have been. What if you had taken that job across the country all those years ago? What would your life look like now? What if you had said yes to that marriage proposal, kept playing in your college noise band, gone to acting school instead of getting your degree in psychology? We want to know about the thing you almost did, but didn’t. What might that have felt like, and do you ever wish you’d had the chance to find out? Share about it in the comments below — and if this gets you writing in your journal tonight, too, all the better…
God of Coincidence
you might have been that long-legged
woman striking as tall as you
we’d looked at the very same Rothko exhibit
a show confined to one floor
so where in the world could she have been
she seemed rushed hailed a cab and fled a mere instant
I noticed her beauty no doubt
but more her eyes’ sadness though they never met mine
her look conveyed well I can’t say what
she shook out her hair at the car-door
the gesture was brisk it made me sigh
because it revealed certain traits I thought
ones I now know were my own inventions
my sorrow plain silly yes but profound
music cuisine dance styles fashions
a million more things have changed
since she escaped as I absurdly
put it I turned just after she vanished
you were there (time’s elastic for me)
and incredibly I still think you’ve stayed
if there’s a god then he or she
uses chance to remain incognito
the two of us might never have met
thank god that woman so quickly got free
I’d been offered that job out west
what might life down in Charleston be
that’s the sort of thought in those long-ago days
you might well have been entertaining
how right in hindsight her taxi moving
her not asking me say what time it was by Sydney Lea