Given enough time (and the proper amount of it devoted to dwelling), a person could be very successful at creating an entire universe of possibilities of what could have, should have, or might have been different if they had made different decisions, thought of something earlier, or any of those infinite varieties of “what if” scenarios that the human brain was capable of pondering and following out to their logical (or sometimes not so very) conclusions.
Serena knew that from personal experience. She had always been a bit of a dweller (something she could remember her parents chiding her for as a child), and she had had plenty of time to wonder about a lot of things in regards to the children she had placed. It was her nature to consider the “what ifs,” and she would have looked at her life through that lens no matter what choices she had made along the way. That she had a particular series of events in her past that made themselves incredibly conducive to such wonderings only served to boost her natural inclinations and turn the “what if” dwelling into one of her most frequently observed pastimes. She told herself that it was either that or knitting. Since the finagling of those needles seemed to be beyond her hands’ motor skill level to accomplish, overthinking seemed a decent alternative. Besides, her endless pondering of the maybes had come in handy on occasion. It was far easier to provide some well-rehearsed and thought out reply to out of the blue questions than to attempt to come up with something when put upon the spot.
What she had decided in the approximately two decades that she had had to think over all the possibilities and implications of this particular set of decisions was that what she was really guilty of was a bizarre combination of not asking enough questions while already knowing too much all at the same time. It didn’t seem either fair or reasonable that that could be the case, but it was the only satisfactory conclusion that she had ever managed to draw. She had been a little naive; she had been a little too willing to let herself be charmed. That’s how it was; that’s how it had happened. While she could paint you the picture of a thousand different stories and their endings of the influence of small and large changes across the board, the reality was that none of them were her reality. She couldn’t go back and rearrange things. After all her time and effort at wondering and pondering, nothing could actually be changed by it. The world didn’t work that way, but she kept up her pondering all the same. She didn’t know any other way to be.