Do you wish you could return to a moment in your past? (Disclaimer: This essay has a large focus on death so please do not read it if you aren’t comfortable with that)

    Initially I didn’t want to write about this prompt but I’ve realized that I have a different answer to the question than other answers I have read, so here we go.

Yes, I would go back.

 In a heartbeat. 

There are so many reasons that I would return to the past given the chance. The main one being that there are people that I would love to be able to see again. My best friend from elementary school passed away in 2018 and I would give anything to get to see her again, to be able to fix our friendship before there wasn’t another chance. 

There’s a debate I’ve had with myself for a very long time now about why our friendship started to fall apart. I know that I tried and that I wanted to stay friends but we were both so busy all the time, we always missed each other's calls, and texts often went ignored. It was no one's fault but it was really sad and kind of frustrating to have someone who’s house you went to almost everyday move over 2,000 miles away and slowly disappear from your life.

 It’s such a fun time when you have to balance the loss of a friendship and the loss of a person at the same time. If I could go back and fix our friendship and only have to deal with one half of the loss at a time, that would be great. It would probably make losing her more painful but I think it would also be a little simpler to process.

There’s a chance that if I could go back in time then I would never be able to move on because I wouldn’t be able to stop her from dying so I would just be reminding myself of what was and can no longer ever be and that might just be painful. On the other hand, reminding myself that we really were friends and that we had a lot of fun together  could make everything a little easier.

I’m not entirely sure what specific moments I would go back to. Even though I previously talked about wanting to fix our friendship, that is not at all a simple thing to do because we didn’t have a fight, there wasn’t one moment where everything went wrong, I can’t stop her from moving away so what options are left? We drifted apart slowly but we never stopped being friends if that makes any sense at all. It might be more accurate to say that our drifting apart was interrupted, it got cut off in the middle ground of still talking to each other but not often enough that our friendship was still entirely intact.

Another issue is that the times I would go back to are all times that I remember. I would rather go back to a time that I don’t really remember so that I can make new memories rather than repeat the days that I already have fond memories of. At this point my main reason for wanting to go back is more to be able to appreciate what I had. You would think that having lost someone and having thought about this stuff for a while that I would have learned to better appreciate everything and everyone that I have but I don’t think it has caused any sort of change like that. I don’t go into everyday appreciating everything because it could be gone the next, though that seems to be the stereotypical response to losing people. If anything, my outlook on life has become much more pessimistic.

After writing all of this I’ve realized I may be more on the fence about going back than I originally thought. I am still going to stick with my initial statement but I do think that I better understand other people’s reasonings now.