CATEGORY: Little Pieces Of Life

What I Never Lived

Alexander takes his jacket from the back of his chair and gives one last glance at the plans still lying open on his desk. He doesn’t want to look at them anymore. At least not now. As he leaves his office, he pauses for a moment in front of Iliana, his secretary, and asks her to take his calls for the next hour. “If anyone asks for me, tell them I’m in a meeting.” Iliana looks up from her screen and studies him for a moment. She knows him well enough to tell from his expression that this is not the right time for too many questions. “Will do,” she replies, and returns to her work.

As soon as the elevator doors close behind him, Alexander lets out a deep sigh. The last meeting about the major construction project they had taken on had not gone at all as he had expected. Yet another problem had come up. A delay, a last-minute change, something that needed to be redesigned, and a series of decisions that, as usual, everyone was waiting for him to make. For weeks now, this particular project had been taking up far more space in his day than he would have liked, and today he felt that he needed, even for a little while, to get away from it all.

When he steps out of the building, he still hasn’t decided where to go. The destination doesn’t really matter. He simply wants some fresh air, a walk, a coffee, and his first cigarette of the day. He has one hour before he needs to return to the office and, right now, that one hour feels almost like a luxury.

Manos had just finished a business meeting in Pangrati. He had been hired to photograph one of the area’s best-known spots and, as he stepped out of the place, he paused on the pavement and checked his watch. He had almost an hour and a half before his dentist appointment in Kolonaki. For a few seconds, he hesitated. He could go back to his office and make use of the time he had, or, for once, he could resist trying to squeeze yet another obligation into his day. The second option quickly began to seem far more appealing.

Then the idea came to him to take a little trip down memory lane. He could head toward the city centre and have a coffee at Athénée. Of course, in his mind, it was still Zonar’s. That was how he had first known it, that was how he remembered it from years ago, and that was probably what he would always call it to himself. The thought of a fragrant coffee, with no rush and nothing else he needed to be doing at the same time, easily won the small debate going on inside his head. He put on his helmet, got on his motorcycle, and headed toward Kolonaki.

Alexander didn’t have much time and didn’t want to waste it looking for somewhere to sit. Almost without thinking, his steps led him to one of his favourite places, a spot he had loved since his university days. He had been there countless times over the years. At first with friends and fellow students, later for business meetings, and then with Aspasia and the children for brunch on the occasional Saturday morning.

As he reached the entrance, the manager recognised him immediately and greeted him warmly. Alexander smiled. He liked that familiarity, the feeling that there were still places in the city where he didn’t need to introduce himself. He chose a table outside, settled comfortably into his chair, and placed his jacket on the chair beside him. He ordered his coffee, took the pack of cigarettes from his pocket and, for the first time since the difficult morning meeting, felt that he could relax a little.

Manos was watching the man approaching the table next to his. There was something strangely familiar about him. The way he walked, perhaps his face, something Manos couldn’t quite place yet. He looked at him more closely as the man put his jacket on the chair.

“Could it be?” he thought.

So many years had passed that, for a moment, he even hesitated to speak to him. He tried to find in the face of the man across from him the boy he remembered from school. And then Alexander happened to turn in his direction.

Their eyes met.

Manos smiled first.

“Alexander?”

Alexander stood still for a moment. He looked at him more closely and suddenly smiled too.

“Manos? Manos… is that really you?”

They stood up almost at the same time and embraced. For a few seconds, all the years that had passed didn’t seem to matter quite so much.

“How many years has it been since we last saw each other?” Alexander asked, still smiling.

“A lot. And we’re not going to count them, because we’ll get depressed,” Manos replied, laughing.

“Come on, sit here. I won’t take no for an answer.”

Alexander picked up his jacket and moved over to Manos’s table.

And just like that, without either of them having planned it, two old school friends found themselves sitting at the same table again after almost thirty years.

Their conversation began the way conversations usually do between people who once knew everything about each other and now have almost an entire lifetime to catch up on. They had gone their separate ways after high school, and from then on their lives had taken very different directions. Alexander studied architecture and, after graduating, began working at a large architectural firm. The years passed quickly, filled with plans, major projects, meetings, and endless hours of work. Somewhere along the way, he met Aspasia. They married, had two children, and built a life together that, as he described it to Manos now, seemed full. Their son had taken the national university entrance exams that year, while their daughter was still in high school. Trips, short getaways, summers with friends, dinners out, gatherings at one another’s homes, weekends that were rarely left without plans. Over the years, he had also achieved the financial comfort that allowed him to give his family things that, back when he was a student, he could only have imagined.

Manos had taken a very different path. He studied economics, just as he had planned, but in the end he didn’t remain faithful to those plans for very long. Photography, which until then had been more of a passion, won him over completely, and at some point he decided to make it his profession. He married too, but his marriage lasted only two years. He never had children and, after the divorce, his life took a shape he could never have imagined in his twenties. His work meant that he travelled often, met new people, and regularly found himself in different places. He had many male and female friends, circles of friends from different periods of his life, and a daily routine that, most of the time, he could shape however he wanted.

“You never got married again?” Alexander asked him.

Manos smiled and shook his head.

“No. I’ve had relationships, of course. But marriage a second time? No. I think I’ve learned to enjoy my freedom.”

Alexander smiled too.

“Doesn’t sound too bad to me.”

He said it with a laugh, almost teasingly.

And yet, somewhere inside him, the words sounded a little different.

Time had passed much faster than either of them had expected. Manos looked at his watch and almost jumped out of his chair. His appointment was getting close, while Alexander should already have been back at the office. They exchanged phone numbers, laughed about how many years it had taken them to run into each other again, and promised that this time they wouldn’t let life keep them apart for so long.

“We’ll arrange something soon,” Alexander said.

“Definitely,” Manos replied.

They embraced once more, and then each went his own way, carrying with him something more than the pleasant surprise of a chance encounter.

By evening, both men were back in their homes, several hours after their chance encounter. The day had carried on as usual. Alexander had returned to the office, Manos had gone to his appointment, and afterward each of them had continued with the rest of his day. And yet, that coffee had not really ended when they got up from the table.

Manos was alone at home. He had poured himself a glass of wine and was sitting on the sofa, absent-mindedly watching something on television, when his thoughts returned to Alexander. His work, Aspasia, his children, his son who had just taken the university entrance exams. The trips, the weekends with friends, that sense of a life that had unfolded almost exactly as they had once imagined life would.

A few kilometres away, in his own home, Alexander was doing exactly the same thing, without of course knowing it. Aspasia was still awake, the children were in their rooms, and the house was settling into its usual evening rhythm. And yet, amid all of this, his mind kept returning to Manos. To his travels, his photography, his friends, and the way he had said, “I’ve learned to enjoy my freedom,” so simply, as though his life belonged entirely to him.

Neither of them knew that, at almost the same time, they had begun making the same silent comparison.

Each was looking at what the other had.

And, almost without realising it, each had begun counting what he believed was missing from his own life.

Manos had felt a small pang of jealousy as Alexander spoke about his children. He had noticed how his face changed whenever he mentioned them, especially when he talked about his son taking the university entrance exams that year and the anxiety they had all gone through together at home. Perhaps this was one of the few thorns in Manos’s life. After his divorce, he had never wanted to marry again and, along with that choice, the years had passed without him having children. He didn’t exactly regret it. After all, his life was full. He had a job he loved, he travelled, he had friends and people close to him, relationships, experiences, and a freedom he had learned to value deeply.

And yet, there were times when he missed the idea of having a family. Not just any family, but the one Alexander had just described to him. A home full of people, children growing up, holidays together, Sundays, celebrations, little family stories built year after year. And that evening, alone at home, he caught himself wondering for a moment what his life might have been like if, at some point, he had chosen differently.

At around the same time, Alexander was sitting alone in the living room when, almost without meaning to, his thoughts returned to Manos. To the trips he had told him about, the people he met through his work, his friends, but most of all to that sentence he had said so casually: “I’ve learned to enjoy my freedom.”

Freedom. The word had stayed with him longer than he would have liked to admit. For a moment, he had envied his old friend. Manos could decide tomorrow to leave on a trip, change his plans, spend his time however he wished without having to consult anyone. Alexander, on the other hand, couldn’t remember the last time he had thought only about what he himself wanted. There was always the office, the clients, the projects, Aspasia, the children, the responsibilities, someone expecting something from him. He looked around at the large, beautiful home he had worked so hard to have and, for a few moments, wondered what it would be like to have none of it waiting for him.

And yet, the more he thought about Manos’s freedom, the more something inside him began to bother him. Because perhaps what he envied was not really a life without a family. Nor did he want to wake up the next morning and find that Aspasia and his children had disappeared. What had touched something inside him was different, something much harder to name.

Perhaps he had forgotten what it felt like to have a little space in his life that wasn’t already filled.

“How much do we really know about the life of the person we compare our own life to?”

Alexander had seen a Manos who was free, independent, travelling, meeting people, enjoying a life without the commitments Alexander himself had grown accustomed to over the years. What he could not know, however, was how difficult it had been for Manos to reach that “freedom.” His divorce had hurt him far more deeply than he allowed others to see and, although years had passed, the idea of a truly intimate relationship still frightened him. There were women in his life. Quite a few “friends,” as he liked to call them with a smile. But none of them had managed to get close enough for him to risk a meaningful connection again.

Perhaps that was why he had recently decided to start seeing a psychologist. Not because he disliked his life, nor because he necessarily wanted to change it, but because he had begun to wonder whether everything he called freedom was truly a choice, or whether somewhere within it there was also a little fear.

And Alexander could not have known that.

But Manos knew just as little about Alexander’s life. He had seen him smile when he spoke about his son and daughter and, in the space of that single hour, had almost unconsciously formed an image of a close, happy family. A life different from his own. Perhaps, for a few moments, one that seemed a little fuller too.

What he didn’t know was that behind the door of Alexander’s beautiful home, things were not always so peaceful. In recent years, there had been a tension between Alexander and Aspasia that neither of them had truly wanted to look at. Their lives were filled with people, dinners out, trips, short getaways, invitations, and groups of friends they had met mainly through their children’s school. They had fun, they laughed, they travelled, they opened their home to friends and were invited into theirs. And yet, amid all that activity, the two of them had slowly begun to drift apart.

Alexander couldn’t remember the last time he and Aspasia had gone out alone. Nor could he remember the last time they had taken a trip with just their children, without friends or other families around them. He wasn’t sure whether they had filled their lives so completely because they enjoyed it, or because, without ever discussing it, they had discovered that having other people around made it easier not to look at what was happening between them.

And Manos could not have known that.

He had seen a father’s face light up when he spoke about his children.

And he had filled in the rest of the picture himself.

It was getting late, and Alexander began to feel uncomfortable with the direction his thoughts had taken. He didn’t like going so deeply into things that, in his everyday life, he had learned to leave somewhere in the background.

“There’s no point digging all this up at this time of night,” he thought.

He got up from the sofa, picked up his glass, and turned off the lights in the living room. As he made his way upstairs to the bedroom, he continued almost talking to himself, as though he were trying to switch off, along with the lights, the conversation he had opened inside himself.

“Besides, whose marriage is perfect? Who is truly happy?”

It was a comforting enough thought to allow him, at least for that night, not to look any further.

At Manos’s home, the same comparison took a different path. The image of Alexander talking about his children kept returning to him. He could easily have brushed it aside. Turned on the television, sent a message, called a friend and simply let the evening pass. But lately, through therapy, he had begun trying something new. Not to move away so quickly from whatever made him uncomfortable. To stay with it for a while and ask himself what exactly had touched something inside him.

And that evening, he knew.

He had envied Alexander.

He didn’t particularly like admitting it, but he didn’t try to change it. He had envied the light in Alexander’s face when he spoke about his children, the family holidays, the little stories from their home. Perhaps more than anything, he had envied that “we” that appeared so naturally whenever Alexander spoke about his life.

And then he remembered an exercise he had recently done with his psychologist. The first time he heard it, it had seemed almost too simple.

“If you want to see where you are today, Manos, try for a moment not to compare yourself with someone else. Compare yourself with the person you were five years ago.”

At the time, he hadn’t paid much attention to the words. But that evening, after meeting Alexander, they sounded different.

Five years ago.

Manos leaned back against the sofa and, for a while, left Alexander out of his thoughts. It didn’t matter now how far Alexander had come, what he had achieved, or what kind of life he had chosen.

For the first time that evening, Manos turned his attention to his own journey.

Where had he been five years ago?

And who was he today?

Manos remained silent for a while. Five years earlier, his life had been very different. The divorce was still recent, the anger and disappointment more present than he wanted to admit, and the idea that he might one day trust a woman again had seemed almost impossible. Photography was already part of his life, but he had not yet reached where he was today. Five years later, he had travelled, worked, met people, built friendships, laughed, fallen in love, been afraid, moved forward. And recently, he had decided to return to therapy because there were still parts of himself he wanted to understand better.

For the first time since saying goodbye to Alexander, he stopped thinking about what Alexander had.

He didn’t need to convince himself that his own life was better. That wasn’t the point. Nor did he need to dismiss that small pang he had felt when he heard his old friend talking about his children. Yes, there were things he had never experienced. There were also things he might once have wished he had lived differently.

But now he could see something else too.

As long as he had been comparing his life with Alexander’s, he had been looking at what was missing. When he compared it with his own life five years earlier, he could finally see everything that had changed.

And perhaps there was a different question to ask.

Not, “Why don’t I have what he has?”

But, “How far have I come?”

He smiled. Alexander’s life was not the measure of his own. Just as his own life could not be the measure of Alexander’s.

Two boys who had once sat in the same classrooms had grown up and taken different paths. Each path held what they had lived and what they had not. Choices, losses, joys, fears, people who came, people who left.

And neither of them truly knew what the other had paid for the life that, for a few moments, he had envied.

Exercise

The next time you catch yourself comparing your life to someone else’s, try changing the person standing across from you for a moment.

Put yourself there.

You, five years ago.

• Where were you then?
• What were you struggling with?
• What did you leave behind?
• What do you still want to change?
  

Not to decide whether you are “better” today.

Simply to see how far you have come.