November 17, 2019:

Yet all these fantasies of roads not taken assume the contemporary me. The somewhat mature gray-haired fellow trying his best not to be hurtful.

In reality I was right to break eye contact with the beautiful paralegal at the firm where I was a temp. I was seething with anger, addiction, loneliness, broken heart. She was sensitive and sweet and I'd have torn her to ribbons, not deliberately, but through clumsiness and my own explosive demons.

Those demons taught me to take pain seriously. Mine and others'. A life lesson, perhaps the life lesson.

So that it's only afterward, if it were now that I were to encounter those women, that I'd be capable of the patience and generosity they'd deserve.

Now that they'd no longer want me. Life's structuring comedy.