“But then again, too few to mention.”

If I were half the human I’ve aspired to be, that sentence would follow the title of this piece.

They keep telling you, me, us; ”No regrets”

It is basically Taoist in principle and I can’t resent it for that. There is something nice in seeing one of the oldest codex for living disseminated down through the ages in so many forms; be it Christianity or trite little sayings.

Maybe nice is the wrong word, maybe comforting a bridge too far, maybe just that there is something warming.

My friends, I don’t know about you, but I’m not even half way through my life and I have really tried and I mean really tried to live life by that maxim. I’ve grabbed it by the horns and I’ve kicked the shit out and back into it. And in the end, I’ve found that saying wanting.

Hand somewhere on chest hopefully near heart, yes, I believe in the “uncarved block” and I believe it’s attainable, but I don’t believe with that comes a state where you regret nothing. I just think maybe, there is a state where the regrets don’t scar every time you remember them, a place where you recognize them and don’t need to be forgiven; either by yourself or others.

I’ve come to believe that if you don’t have at least one regret then you haven’t really lived that you’re not living that maybe you’ll never truly live.

Mistakes help make us human. Without mistakes, we would be Gods. Without mistakes, we would lose a very valued level of communication between ourselves. And really, I know right now, someone is reading this saying something along lines of,

”Well I don’t have any regrets.”

Or some other bullshit about mistakes.

But then, lets face it; they’re just the type of sanctimonious assholes we all love to hate.

Well, I have regrets and I’m proud of my regrets. My flaws work toward completing me more than any of my perfections. And they are all my own, I don’t choose to try and cast the blame and lay them at the feet of some imaginary invisible entity in the sky.

While I’m proud that they’re mine; I may not ever be proud I made those mistakes; but damn it, when I made them, I was living.

Some haunt me, but then those are the demons that drive me. To never repeat the same, to be a better human, to just think before I act. Any number of don’t put your hand on the hotplate again lessons.

Some are fond, in that way you sort of chuckle when you reminisce at what an idiot you were, vaguely embarrassed, but hey, we’re all allowed do that once.

Some I don’t know what to do with and I guess they’ll perplex me until I’m done.

And as I roll a cigarette to change the beat, I suppose it’s one of those that has pushed me to write this.

Traveling is a strange state of being. Many, many things can happen to you, influence you. Much of the time it’s as if you’ve been slowed down and the world around you sped up other times, you appear to be taken out of the loop. When it’s moving faster, things pitch up until the world becomes a blur of moving people and lights and all there is, is you, standing, staring at the flight time board as you try and figure out what desk your connecting flight checks in at.

It was traveling that one of these mistakes, one of the most stupid of my mistakes happened to me. And it’s not so much one that haunts me or one that perplexes me as one that leaves me with an echoing What If?

Every two maybe three days, I go through the memory, six maybe seven times. I’m not sure why, I’ve never questioned that part of my brain. Sometimes, if the night is right, it’ll play through my mind on repeat, like an old movie on a classics gold satellite channel that has gone idle until the next day starts.

I was coming home from a funeral. I think.

Coming home to the fragments of a relationship that’d soured.

There were things, actions, mistakes-unrelated, that I regret had led me to missing a flight.

Either way I ended up in Gatwick.

I was supposed to check-in – but I got distracted by a face that walked by me; delicate, it floated by and all I could was turn where I stood and go quite plaintively “What the fuck?”

It was just one of those moments – the ones you have when something passes that just catches you and you didn’t really catch a proper glimpse but your brain pushed you anyway to go – oh sweet mother of… you should have seen that. Yet you did, it’s just not accessible.

I didn’t even know what I was looking at.

And so reality catches up with you and you shake your head and go back about your business.

Where was I?

Ah yes, I was checking in.

Gatwick isn’t the most helpful of airports. Many aren’t. Sometimes, that’s just how it is.

So I ambled around and found my check-in area. I was early so no one was there and I ended up going for a cigarette then leaning against a pillar as I waited. Only to realize the desk was actually open and that the girl was really just chatting to the one beside her and not waiting for something to happen.

Those are the mistakes that make you feel stupid.

Something, a smell, a body or a face rushed past me, and head turned I walked into the man departing the desk. After some apologies I righted myself and ambled towards the desk allowing other people to queue in front of me as I kept my head turned to toward the shape that was very grumpily reviewing papers near the pillar where I’d been standing.

This is the rapture. Pay attention.

I turned to find this woman of if I remember right, sandy blonde brownish hair that slightly resembled the dirty gold thread I imagine Rumpelstiltskin was spinning from straw with his rickety old loom. She was wearing a thick dirty white woolen jumper that although it cloaked her form, showed at least her feminine shape. Brow furrowed, she had a dark almost furious look about her as she paged through and scanned documents.

This is the ghost on the horizon. Try not to think about it.

I couldn’t even explain to you if I tried; what I saw and all that it held, except to say; have you ever looked at someone, a stranger, who maybe was making a dark face and said to yourself, “I bet they have a beautiful smile, a top score pinball smile, a smile that lights up like a collapsing star.” Well maybe not those exact descriptive words, but I think you get what I mean.

This is the crux. Sorry it took so long to get to it.

Transfixed is the only word I can find to place my mind at the moment. I can’t say whether she was pretty to you or whether she would have been pretty to the general populous. I can only say that this comfort clothes wrapped woman was to me – beautiful – in the rarest meaning of the word. Grumpy, scowling, wrapped in unflattering clothes you might be thinking. Yet there was something about her face, something that told me if she smiled it would be like a sun re-igniting, something that told me her whole form would blossom and in that hypothesis I was transfixed.

Unknowing as to where she was going, I went and checked in. I took some long dragged moments walking away from the desk, slow walking, the type you did when you were a teenager, left eye on her, right eye making sure I didn’t walk into anymore people.

I ran my luggage trolley right and wide, around the pillar so I could see where she was going. I didn’t have a plan, but that’s where living with no regrets came into the picture.

There are no mistakes. As such.

I have to say I was pleasantly surprised to see her checking in to the same flight as me. Those are the things you ask reality for, those small chances those openings that may or may not gift you with something if you just have the gumption to use them.

Ever the stalker, I waited until she left the desk then wandered behind her, taking a swift right when she took a right. I did, after all, have whisky to buy. I was I thought slightly assured by the fact that she was on the same flight as me that I had time and that I would be able to track her down and offer her maybe a cup of coffee or something.

She just looked that interesting. Forgive me.

Buying whisky was some sort of single malt dream and then I’m there in the main pavilion looking about, moving from coffee shop to bar seeing if I can find this furious looking woman. I only need to make her smile; then the circle is complete.

I couldn’t find her. I lost her.

I looked and I looked but I couldn’t find her and then it was last or second last calls for the flight and I’d wasted all my time and had to all but sprint to my gate. Stopping only to ask a kindly airport worker if I was going the right way.

So I found myself on the walk for the plane, through corridors, security checks and all the usual until I found myself on the runway and I decided to walk for the back stairs of the plane.

I took a seat maybe eight rows from the back of the plane. Where I sat earnestly keeping an eye out for this woman, hoping beyond hope that’d maybe she’d manage to catch the flight. A couple more groups came in at the top of the plane and a few dregs at the bottom and I was left, in a fidgeting impatient plane, thinking she’d missed her flight.

Then just as the attendants began murmuring about closing the back door there came a slight commotion that was enough to turn me around just in time to see her appear in a fluster on the plane. If I was sat on the left in aisle seat, she somehow managed to sit on the right in the aisle seat in the row directly behind me.

Sometimes, reality shines on the stupid. Just sometimes.

I don’t remember much about the flight; I ordered a hotdog, a couple of brandies, booze in general, beer, coffee. I remember trying to be subtle in my glances to look at her. She still looked angry though now it veered to upset and at one stage I saw her hold her head and shake in what looked like sobbing.

I’m thick like this. Properly thick.

So I said previously in this piece that I’d tried to live life with no regrets, no mistakes. One of those things was to; whenever I saw a woman who deserved it, to always tell them I thought they were beautiful. It was and never has been a pick up line; I always walk away after. So in acknowledging that, I feel slightly less ashamed to say I had spent sometime in the beginning of the flight writing a note that I wasn’t sure whether to read or to hand to her asking her could I buy her a coffee.

Look, I was younger then. Like I said, properly thick.

Yet when I looked at her, as she shook and held, rubbed her eyes in what looked like sobbing, the half unpacked packed lunch she’d brought with suspended around her. The note was forgotten and all I could do was gently tap her shoulder and ask her quietly was she all right.

Blinking eyes, wide and bright, came up to meet me and I got the first glimmer of a smile and it was, just that glimmer, everything I thought it might be. She shook her head, composed herself and told me she was fine. I nodded and smiled and turned away, yet kept an eye on her as she finished unpacking her lunch and checked her passport. She was Polish.

When the drinks came around I waited a moment, I’d been eyeing her and she didn’t look well or happy, so I did the only thing I could do and I offered to buy her a coffee, which she by gesturing to the drink she’d bought on the plane politely refused. Yet I got another glimmer of the smile, more than before and I’d be lying if several circuits within my brain didn’t fry out.

So the flight goes on and we land and we go through customs – the whole spiel and I lose her again.

But then, there I was, waiting by the baggage belt when she appeared right beside me. I couldn’t really believe my luck and so I stood frozen by the what the fuck do I? for several moments before I actually took action. In the end, you only live twice and so I did the only thing I could do, I turned around and started talking to her. I think it started something like,

“Excuse me?”

She turned around.

“I don’t normally do this, in fact I’ve never done this before, but, it’s just, I saw you in Gatwick on the plane and I saw that you seemed to be in a bad mood. But I don’t know, I looked at you and I thought to myself, I bet, through that frown she has an amazing smile and I don’t know I just wanted to make you smile. I figured that if you had such a smile that you’d really be an interesting person to talk to and I’m not trying to pick you up or look for anything. I guess I think, all I’m saying is that, maybe, because you seem so interesting maybe we could meet for a coffee or something.

And then and there, I got the smile, the fullness of the smile.

And it almost crippled me.

We introduced ourselves; her name was Anna.

She was Polish, I was Irish, we had a brief chat that was both awkward and warm somewhere within which I asked her out for a coffee again more clearer this time, outside of the the ohsweetlord babble that happens in those usual let’s grab life by the nuts and run moments. She told me no, that she didn’t go for coffee with people so late at night, when I explained I didn’t mean on the night she smiled and said yes. I repeated that I was sorry found her interesting but didn’t normally do this sort of thing, approach a random stranger, but it was just that she was just that interesting looking. She half laughed half smiled and agreed to a coffee and when I suggested phone numbers, she actually threw her phone at me. Threw it now, no exaggeration, I had to catch it.

And this is where it all goes wrong.

I had her phone.

I could have taken her number.

I could have done any number of things.

Instead, in some narcotic haze of embarrassment whereby my brain had left the building Elvis style, I put my number into her phone and suggested that if she wanted to go for that coffee that she call me. And with that, excused myself and half ran half walked to the bathroom which I’d been screaming for since the landing had begun.

It was, quite possibly the most stupid mistake I’ve ever committed.

I don’t know what to say.

Obviously she never phoned.

Obviously I never found out what had her so wound up or upset about coming to Dublin.

Obviously I was a complete retard for the whole “no you phone me” spiel. I can only claim embarrassment.

All the same though.

I made her smile.

More than once.

And I made her smile properly, for more than a minute and it was glorious.

All the same though.

What if

I never saw her again…

Never heard from her again…

I don’t know what happened to her and Dublin is a pretty small place.

So mistakes, regrets, I’ve had a few – enough to mention.

Enough to always have a moment in my head where I’ll always wonder what happened to Anna.

And just what if?

What if I hadn’t had such an acute moment of shy?

Just, what if?