There are so many lives I want to live

The grief of unlived lives.

There’s this quiet ache I carry sometimes, especially late at night when everything is still and I finally stop pretending I have it all figured out. It comes uninvited, soft but firm like the weight of a blanket that doesn’t warm, just reminds you it’s there. And it whispers to me: There are so many lives I want to live.

And I think you probably feel it too.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent my whole existence standing at the edge of a hundred open roads, frozen by the knowing that no matter how far I walk down one, I’ll never touch the others. And yet I want them. All of them. Even the ones that don’t make sense. Even the ones I wouldn’t survive. Even the ones that would break me.

I want to be the version of me that lives in a cabin surrounded by forests and fog, where I wake up at 5:00 a.m. and write with cold fingers and a warm cup of tea. No city noise. No deadlines. Just words and silence. Maybe a cat. Maybe solitude that doesn’t ache.

There’s the life where I live in a small, sun-drenched town with terracotta roofs, maybe somewhere in southern Italy, and I run a tiny bookstore that smells like paper and sea salt. I wear linen shirts, I cycle everywhere, and I fall in love with the same person every morning over coffee. Sometimes that person is me.

Then there’s the life where I’m a music teacher in a sleepy Midwest town, and I spend evenings tuning pianos and playing Chopin for the moonlight that spills in through my windows. The students come and go, but I remember their names. I know the ones who cry when their fingers can’t find the notes. I remind them that that’s part of learning that feeling.

Another life: I’m in New York. A freelance writer living off late-night Chinese takeout and unpaid invoices, but God, I write things that matter. I write about loneliness and lust and the sound of trains at 2 a.m. I write about the way strangers meet eyes and how some silences hold more weight than full conversations. Maybe no one reads me. Maybe the right person does.

I want to be a barista in a mountain town. a radio host in the 90s. a film photographer in berlin. a backpacker with no plan. a teacher. a lover. a stranger. i want to be the guy someone writes a song about.

I want too much. I know.
But when has longing ever been polite?

Some nights, I mourn the lives I will never get to meet.
I imagine them in their little universes, the other versions of me going about their days, unaware that I’m watching.
One of them is laughing on a beach somewhere, and he doesn’t know this version of me is crying at 2:30 a.m. over an unspoken dream.
One of them is performing on a stage.
One of them has never known heartbreak.
One of them didn’t survive it.

What a strange thing, to hold so many versions of yourself and still never feel whole. What a strange thing to crave experiences you’ve never had, to feel homesick for places you’ve never lived, to miss people you’ve never met.

It’s a weird kind of grief, isn’t it?
The grief of unlived lives.

No one prepares us for it.
Everyone tells us we have one life, make it count, make the right choices, don’t waste time. But no one talks about how, even when you make the right choice, it still costs you something. You choose one door, and behind you, a thousand others quietly close. And you feel that. Even if you don’t say it out loud. You mourn them.

We are made of all the things we didn’t become.

I think about the person I was supposed to become.
And then the one I accidentally became.
And then the one I’m still trying to forgive.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s okay not to be certain.
To let yourself be undone.

But I think we get glimpses.
I think we meet people who remind us of who we could’ve been.
I think we visit cities that awaken a sleeping part of us, even if just for a few days.
I think we read books that unlock someone we thought we lost.
I think we fall in love and feel pieces of ourselves we didn’t know existed.

And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe that’s the point.

We don’t need to live every life.
But we can touch them.
We can taste them in fleeting moments in songs that wreck us, in conversations that shift us, in the stillness of late nights when we finally admit to ourselves that we want more.

No more success.
More aliveness.

We want to feel.
That’s it. That’s what all of this is about.

We want to feel like we’re not wasting this tiny, wild, complicated existence.
We want to look back and say I felt everything.
I was never numb.
I opened myself to the ache, and I let it make me soft instead of bitter.
I let it show me the depth of being alive.

And if I never become all the things I dreamed of,
I hope I become…..
Someone who stayed open.
Someone who kept reaching.
Someone who let himself want more, even when it hurt.

So yeah.
There are so many lives I want to live.
And maybe I won’t get to live them all.
But I can dream them.
I can write them.
I can feel them ripple through the life I’m living now.

And maybe that’s enough.
Maybe wanting more is the most human thing about me.
Maybe it’s not something to fix.
Maybe it’s proof that I’m still open.

Still alive.
Still dreaming.
Still here.