Free vicarious.ly by Emilio Cecconi Page A

about to act in a way that’s out of ‘character’, I just hide behind a mask and start acting. Some things are better left unsaid. Even though my chest was burning as I was asking Michelle to keep on telling me about her boyfriend, I couldn’t let her know about my previous intentions for the evening. Nor could she know that I’d been daydreaming about her non stop when she had been meeting, getting to know, then dating this new guy.
    After I walked Michelle home, I watched her walk up her steps. As I walked away I saw her turn on her apartment lights. Then I thought to myself, in about an hour Diego would be walking in and being exactly where I wanted to be. Until tomorrow, he’d be a mystery to me. Oh yea, except for the dozens of pictures Michelle showed me of him on her phone.
    I had experienced this all before. As I was walking towards my apartment I passed by the used bookstore that Kyla and I shared our last meal in. I grabbed a coffee from that bookstore to keep me company down the cold walk outside. Suddenly the events of the two nights converged and I felt like I was watching the past happen like I was an outside observer on my own life. I imagined the events of the dinner I just had with Michelle and the last dinner I had with Kyla happening at the same time while I was walking down the sidewalk of Newbury Street. Life is full of surprises isn’t it?
    At that moment I thought it would be fitting to walk back to the Public Garden so I could overlay this experience on top of the memory I had with Kyla the last time I saw her there. I kept sipping my coffee on the way there and just sat there thinking how delusional I had been this entire year. The worst part about this scenario is that I built it up in my imagination so much.
    I wanted to feel pain. I wanted to feel loss. I wanted to cry and feel like my life was falling apart. But I didn’t feel any of that. I felt quite calm, a little disappointed but not sad. I just looked over to the swan boat lagoon and felt a little empty. I didn’t feel lonely, just empty. Not in the sense I was sad, I just couldn’t really think about anything.
    I sat on the same bench that I was on when Kyla broke up with me. I imagined that somewhere, somehow, within the mysteries of time I was sitting next to Jake as Kyla was just breaking up with him. We were separated only by time.
    “Hey Jake, the next six years are going to be pretty wild. You’ll be back here again but you’ll be thinking about a different girl. Funny the ways things work out right?” I said, imagining speaking to a younger version of myself.
    Oh well. At least I didn’t write the algorithm that paired them together. Now that would be pretty bad right? Thank God it was YinYang.
    “Please don’t lose hope Jake. Stay strong for the both of us and make it through those next six years,” I said as a tear went down my face.
    I sat there on that bench for the next few hours and thought about the word opportunity. I always thought of myself as a person who seized the opportunities that were in front of me. That night, in no way could I say that I didn’t take advantage of any opportunities. I graduated from a great college, I was on my way to a great career, but somehow I felt like I didn’t make the most out of some of the opportunities that weren’t directly presented to me.
    For the rest of the night I thought about the word choice. I thought about how the expectations of other people have dictated the choices that I made and the opportunities I sought out. I also kept thinking because of some of the choices I made, I abandoned or failed to see opportunities that I should have pursued.
    When I’m at a loss of words, I start spending lots of time thinking about specific words and their meaning. Not just the meaning from a dictionary point of view but what the word means to me in my life. It’s one of those habits from philology that just won’t die.
    As my fingers were starting to go numb from the