I had a dream right before I woke up this morning. In it, an old friend and long lost crush appeared and reconciled with me, apparently because someone else had pretended to be me and contacted her via some email or message that somehow made things better.

It was a weird dream, and I’m not sure it makes any sense, but I felt like it reminded me of her again. She’s a girl from my past. I wrote some vague blog entries a while back about her. We never actually dated. It was unrequited love nonsense of the stupidest kind.

I did a lot of stupid things and managed to alienate her from me. It’s a long story, and probably not worth getting into here. Suffice to say, I still think about her, still wish her well, still wonder how she’s doing. I regret a lot of things, but I also hope that, somehow, the experience helped her grow and succeed in life in other ways.

Emotions are foolish, I guess. At times the thing I want more than anything else in the world is just to reconcile, to even be able to speak to her again. As old friends whose paths diverged long ago.

But, I don’t deserve that. I know I don’t. And I’m afraid if I tried to reach out again, she’d just block me.

What do I want? Why do I feel? What’s the point of all this?

I sometimes think, if I had more agency, I would just contact her in a more straightforward, honest manner, and work things out like an adult. Most likely she’d just ignore me, or say some angry things, but at least we’d be going somewhere.

I tried in therapy a while back to get some help with moving on. My therapist actually suggested I write a letter, but not send it, and then write what I think her response would be. I balked at that. I didn’t want to put words in her mouth.

They say that things that happen in your 20s leave a stronger impression…

It doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, but it matters to each of us. So, I continue to wait for something that will never happen. I continue to dream about something I don’t deserve.

The reality is that I made mistakes and lost a good friend. The consequences of life actions need to matter. As John Green put it, “the world is not a wish-granting factory”. So, the right thing to do, sometimes, is nothing at all.