The Girl

A few years ago, while I was still at university, I went out for coffee with a friend and saw the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life - she was working at the coffee shop. I was transfixed by this girl. There was just something unique about her and in all the years since then I've never been able to describe the sort of beauty she radiated. I don't like to think of myself as shallow (maybe I'm wrong about that) but I think even the deepest thinkers on the planet, when they observe someone or something they perceive as beautiful, at least acknowledge it as such. Sure, there's a whole lot more to a person than what they look like but I don't think many people would deny that a physical attraction is often what initially draws people together. Not always, but definitely often.

Me being the suave and confident guy that I am, I didn't hesitate to head right up to her and ask her out. Yeah, right. I drank my coffee, spoke to my friend, and went home. Since it was a coffee shop where I often met my friends, over the next few weeks I was there again and again - and so was she. Every time I saw her I wanted to say something casually funny while placing my order but found myself so nervous that I could barely even speak. That made it a little tough. The coffee shop also happened to be next to the cinema I used to go to every week and I had to walk past it every time I went to see a movie. I often stopped in there after the movie to get a cup of coffee, whether I was with other people or by myself. It didn't get any easier for me, I never got close to talking to her and could hardly even make eye contact. Just reflecting on the situation as I write this is making me nervous so imagine how I felt back then.

Over the weeks and months that followed I often felt conflicted when I thought about her. On one hand, here was this girl I was really attracted to even though I knew nothing about her; on the other hand, I lacked the confidence to say anything at all to her which was a pretty big roadblock in terms of getting to know her. It didn't matter how much I thought about it, I couldn't think of a way to just be cool and say something. I was way too nervous for that and I knew if I tried I would probably come off as crazy. Every week or so I would still go there for a cup of coffee and each time I did so without saying anything I became more sure that I never would. I never did.

A guy I used to work with once asked me if I collected anything. I half-jokingly answered that I collected regrets. I was smiling while I said it and he laughed about it but I really was only half joking; I do collect regrets and I have a lot of them. In theory, you shouldn't have regrets in life. Regrets speak of mistakes and missed opportunities. While having regrets can be valuable if you recognise what you're feeling, learn from it and let it help inform your choices in the future (mistakes aren't really mistakes if you can learn from them), it often also speaks of an inability to forgive yourself for acting the way you did under certain circumstances. Self-forgiveness is something I'm yet to master and thus my regrets don't serve as guiding lights for my future actions but instead as reminders of past failures and my flawed character. Of all the regrets I have in my life up to this point, never saying anything to that girl is perhaps my biggest.

That may seem like an immensely trivial thing to regret so much but it's not so much about that specific situation as it is about what my inaction in that situation says about who I am. On one level it's incredibly simple: I was attracted to someone and yet I couldn't find the courage to do anything about it. Even on that superficial level I regret it a lot. But it goes far deeper than that. It's not so much about me not being able to ask a girl out or what she would have said to me if I had managed to work up the courage to do so. It's not really even about that at all. If I look a little deeper I can see that it's really about me knowing what I want and firmly believing that I don't deserve it. It's about me feeling unworthy of what I want. It wasn't obvious to me back then that that's what was happening but it makes sense to me now. I can recall plenty of other instances in my life where that thought process has been paralleled. I have often found myself in situations where I felt I didn't deserve what I wanted. Those thoughts have become almost involuntary. I'm at a point now where desire in itself is almost painful and I try not to want anything at all but that's just left me feeling incredibly empty and worthless.

Is that the lesson I'm supposed to learn from this? Not the part about being worthless, the part about avoiding desire. That's what Buddhism's all about: ridding yourself of desire. I just think that, if I was supposed to learn that lesson, it shouldn't be because I believe I'm unworthy of what I desire. Surely it should come from an entirely different mindset, more like a realisation that desire can never provide lasting happiness. Right? In any event, this is just an interesting tangent and I really don't know what I'm talking about. I'll get back to what I was writing about to start with: the girl.

As I said, I never spoke to her beyond saying, "I'll have a cappuccino, thanks." I just never found that confidence. Anyway, more than a year (perhaps even two years) after I had first seen her I was out at the beach one summer night with some friends. We were there to watch a fire-twirling display; it had become a weekly event over the summer and every Sunday night a hundred-or-so people (at least) would gather in the park beside the beach at sunset to watch the fire-twirling as a dozen drummers pounded hypnotically on enormous tribal drums. Between the sound of the waves and the drums, the salty sea air, the fire, and the starry night sky it was just magic.

My friends and I watched and listened for an hour or so before walking up to the headland, eventually returning to the park and sitting for a little while. A bit later we decided to call it a night. I stood up to leave and began to make my way through the crowd of people. As I was doing so, someone cut through the crowd and walked right in front of me. It took me a second to realise it but it was the girl from the coffee shop. By now it was pretty dark and only the fire and moonlight illuminated the people in the park but I knew that it really was her and that I wasn't just imagining it. I didn't know what to do or whether I should say something or not so I just stood there. She had walked past me and off into the night but about twenty seconds later she walked right in front of me again, this time heading in the opposite direction. I wanted to say something, I really did. I thought it was about as good an opportunity as I was ever going to get. Maybe it was, but I'll never know.

I only remember seeing her once more after that night. It was a few weeks later and I was at the same beach one afternoon and she passed me walking through the park. I went back to the coffee shop a few more times but I don't remember ever seeing her again. I had gone to school with one of the other girls who worked at the coffee shop so I thought I might ask her if she knew the girl and try to find out what had happened to her. That sounds like rather a simple task but I somehow managed to turn that into a nearly insurmountable undertaking. The girl I went to school with and I had always made small-talk about how we were going when we saw each other in the coffee shop - it's not like I couldn't actually talk to her at all - but I got so nervous about trying to bring up the subject of the other girl that it took me weeks to muster the courage to ask even the most basic of questions about her.

My behaviour during that conversation would probably be best described as Woody Allen-esque. I've often thought of myself as that kind of person, minus the intelligence and wit, which, come to think of it, just leaves the neuroses, making me less of a Woody Allen-type character and more of a standard-issue neurotic person. It's probably just that I love Woody's movies and relate to the character he plays - I figure if I'm going to be neurotic I'm probably best thinking of myself as a hilariously exaggerated version of myself. At least that way I might be able to look back on things and laugh. Anyway, I doubt I behaved like Woody would have in the same circumstances (he manages to make witty remarks even when suffering extreme nerves) but that's what I felt like.

After walking towards my car, stopping abruptly, heading back towards the coffee shop, stopping again, walking back towards the car I stopped myself again and decided that I needed to make myself go back to the coffee shop and ask about this girl. I got back to the coffee shop and saw the girl I went to school with sitting at a table by herself, drinking a coffee and reading the newspaper. Walking over to her I asked if I could sit down and the I took a seat. Exactly what I said is a mystery to me but I remember I talked really fast and said things without thinking about them first, meaning I'm sure a lot of what I said was pretty much nonsensical. The one thing I do remember about the whole exchange is that my friend was looking at me with a furrowed brow the whole time, as if trying to figure out what was going on. Eventually I managed to ask about the girl and found out that she had got a job somewhere else. I asked if she knew how I might get in touch with her and she said that she could probably find an e-mail address or something if I wanted to come back and see her again in a few days. I said that sounded good but after I left I realised how crazy I must have sounded so I never went back to get the e-mail address. I could hardly e-mail her anyway, she had no idea who I was. I just had to face the fact that I had had several opportunities to act and had wasted them all.

I still think about her sometimes; I wonder where she is and whether I might bump into her on the street ten years from now. It's irrational to think like that, I recognise that, but I think part of me just likes to torture myself and not let it go completely. I wish I could say that I'd learned from what was so obviously a mistake but I think I'd do things the same way if I had the chance to do it over again. It's not that I wouldn't want to do things differently, I just don't see how I could find a way to overcome my fear. And I still think I don't deserve what I want.

It's been said that at the end of your life your greatest regrets will be about the things you didn't do and wish you did, not the mistakes you made or the things you did that didn't go the way you wanted them to. The things you wanted to do but never did, those are the things you'll always be left wondering about, never knowing what might have been.