Flashbacks, Fantasies, Meaningless Recollections

 I'd be lying if I said that I haven't been "quite right" this past year and possibly since April 2020 if I think about it.

Strange things are happening which I can attribute to my Ego a bit and to a strange feeling about my own morbidity.  I've realised that I am now OLD or so they say.  I see people of my age around me dying and suddenly to the front of my mind comes an acknowledgement that indeed, I've lived longer than I'm going to live and I am then haunted by these flashbacks and fantasies.

They are in general fond recollections of relationships I had and they are vivid memories, things I'd long forgotten but here's the strange thing, in those are regrets and what ifs.  By that I mean that I didn't do specific things then that I perhaps could have.  These take form all at once and then they stay with me for some days, the same scenario played over in various ways with the how I wanted it to be at the beginning then how it is at the end and also all the permutations that could have unfolded. 

Example:  A friend of mine that I have known since I was 15 or so.  She married another friend of mine and then divorced and is now married again.  When we were young she was very special to me and on one occasion we spent an innocent day where we just held hands and strolled in the summer sun and life was lovely and that's it.  Nothing else happened.  We all hung around together and she was involved with my friend and that was it.

The dream sequence goes along the line that we are at an unidentified friend's funeral.  She and I are chatting and quite suddenly she turns towards me and sees my (quite clearly affectionate) expression and asks "how long have you felt like this?" I look rather shyly at her and state "Since that day we held hands when we were teenagers."  What goes on from there varies from finally we get together to her being unable to leave her husband to a series of what if scenarios about maybe I should have just said something at the time.

Example: A daydream will flash before me and it is my girlfriend and I in our white clothes (you have to be a 70s couple) going out to the beach and she and I are great together.  Both of us are fit, thin, healthy, young and we've got great skin and the world at our feet and it all fell apart a few months later - work circumstances and so we went separate ways.  You can't unfix life but things would have been different if we had different circumstances.  She was lovely, very sweet and the odd dreams then play around with timelines and what ifs.  I go back to some of our adventures, the car I had the journeys and the fun times but why is this happening?  What on earth does it achieve?

None of these things can ever be, there's no chance of me getting back together with something that happened more than 40 years ago. So what is my brain trying to achieve with all this stuff.  It isn't just the dream it's the feeling - I can feel the sun on my body, the breeze, the exhilaration and so on.

Each dream moves on to make room for another after a few days or up to a week in some cases.  My recent one about my "Angel" is vivid, romantic, tearful and sad and exhilarating at the same time.  She made a huge impact on me, perhaps of anyone I've ever known.  Such intensity of feelings in such a short time, so madly in love and yet the whole relationship was doomed from the start.  Being human and not a calculating machine makes you overlook the impossibility of the situation but yet it happened and it was amazing.  INTJs are rubbish at that sort of relationship normally.  So I flash back to the music, the wait to meet each other, the melding of our minds and bodies.  The days were fantastic, I was transported to a place where I was completely connected to my surroundings and I spent ages in the golden wheat fields and then the shady woods.

This is happening now, it is as if I am replaying these moments and then regretting that things turned out like they have.  You can't go back, things cannot change from the way they are.  What would I do if they could change?  Would we get back together and what damage would that cause to life today and there is the whirlpool in my head smashing all these relationships, feelings, ideas, fantasies and outcomes together mashing up a thousand outcomes to every possible nuance saying "what if" this or that happened.

So I don't really get what is going on.  I think that I am having some sort of sorting it out moment.  I'm not sure things are good at the moment.  I am certainly not in a great place for sure.  Maybe it's something that is deeper, maybe my brain/body know something and I'm just too stupid to have figured it out (another INTJ issue BTW).  Yes, maybe it's something that the rest of me has worked out and my head just hasn't caught up with.