What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can read only a few and those perhaps not accurately

Steinbeck - Winter of our discontent

I think everyone must have one person who they never could say no to. Someone they won’t forget about very quickly. Mine had many names - women, as they say, live their different lives one after the other. I think she’s Penni now. I remember her as Phillipa. It makes no difference.

I knew her when she was seventeen. I can’t help but think if I wasn’t such a stupid little fucker I could have held onto her and given her the support she needed and the bad stuff that happened wouldn’t have happened after that. But I was, and I didn’t and it did. That’s the price you pay a lot of the time - you only become the right person to act after your time to act has passed.

Yesterday I searched the web to see her sites. Horse RPGs. It looks like she’s happy and busy, and I’m hopeful about that. Time must have put right what I didn’t.

Part of me wants to send her a message, just to see if she will answer - it wouldn’t be dignified but it would be an experiment (and I do like experiments) so, one day, I guess I will.

In the end I didn’t say no to her, I just went. She might have cared but didn’t say it. Now, I’m the man who should have been there five years ago - who truly would have done things right - and I’ve come all this way with no one to meet. One day I will tavel down the coast to Eden, where her mother wanted to retire to ten years ago. I think it must be the centre of the world of things that could have been but weren’t.