Accidental Babies

I love the song "Accidental Babies" more than is probably healthy.  It's an atrocious song, right?  Filled with regret and wish and the acknowledgment that life moves on, that we move on, and that some things can never be the same even if they seemed so desperately right in the moment.  Love between two people doesn't seem to follow rules.  Life happens and gets terribly in the way.  One is immature.  Or one feels a desperate yearning for something that turns out to be a shallow, misunderstood desire. Or one finds another love only to realize the first was, indeed, the superior.  Is this, then, a part of the path we walk?  Unfulfilled, unrealized, almost somethings between friends or strangers or roommates or old loves?

"Does he drive you wild, or just mildly free?'

How many people, do you think, end up with someone who drives them wild?  How many people are lucky enough to do forever with someone who makes them feel so alive?

Is it healthy, even, to maintain that pace?

I had a teacher in high school who maintained that the most boring man you meet, the one who absolutely drives you to tears with his unexcitability is the one you should marry.  She insisted, in fact, that he would be the stable father/husband figure about which every woman dreams.  No wild, passionate break up notes followed shortly by desperate reconciliations.  No letters of poetry insisting life without the other is equivalent to a death.  Nothing exotic or crazy or world altering.  Just a constant, stable love.  A dinner on the table, a consistent income, and a father who would desperately love children.

What do I do with the almost-had moments of my life?  Do I put them on the shelf and dust them off from time to time and reminisce about what those days were like or do I, in a moment of absolute insanity, pursue them?  Do I write an illicit letter in the dark, secretly relaying feelings I thought I had put to bed?  Or do I forget them?  Forget them forever.  Bury them deeply. Pursue my automaton lifestyle in which I do not think too deeply or too long upon anything that troubles me, upon the imaginings that sneak up when I am close to sleep, or in the moment I make eye contact, across the room, with someone who used to mean so desperately much to me.

I like this song, I think, because none of us is without regret.  Because life would not be without opportunities missed.  The point, I suppose, is to think about those moments in which you felt so god damned alive and to relish them for existing, while whole heartedly appreciating precisely where you are and precisely what you have.  I'm not talking about putting blinders on and trudging on if life is awful.  But in the case that you have found another who drives you wild (and not mildly free) and is bold enough to take you on, then I suppose you should relish that person.  And, perhaps, have accidental babies with him.

Maybe the real lesson here is simply to have Accidental Babies.  Does that seem like a good plan?