Why does it feel like we are married to 8 different people over the course of a lifetime?
“It’s over” were the last words Charles typed out on his phone. His thumb hesitated for the briefest of moments before it came crashing down with finality on the send button.
The cute and athletic girl he met while being on the same coed volleyball team was now a completely different person. The long hours of being an unpaid intern, has made her 30 pounds heavier, 10 times more emotional, and now a permanent fixture in front of the TV. He no longer had any more feelings for her.
Immediately his phone began to vibrate nonstop as if it were having a heart attack. A torrent of texts began to bombard his inbox. Cindy’s name kept flashing on his screen as if it were begging for him to answer. But Charles turned his phone off and flung it carelessly into the corner of his cluttered room.
As he began to bitterly collect and dispose of all the keepsakes from his freshly discarded relationship, he happened to stumble upon an old high school year book. As he began to riffle through the pages, his index finger landed on the dimpled smile of his high school crush; Ashley.
As he closed his eyes and imagined what it would be like to be dating her, he suddenly felt like he was falling forward… into the year book. And then she was there… except now in her 20’s.
As he got reacquainted with her over a candle-lit dinner, he was shocked to see how critical she had become after an endless string of failed relationships. After hurriedly retreating to the solitude of the restroom and splashing water on his face, Charles found himself unexpectedly back in his bedroom. The strange yearbook was still in his lap.
For the rest of the night, he kept using his yearbook to visit various realities and meet all his former flames. Each one ended up being a disappointment to him, because they all had changed. Even when he teleported back to Ashley in hopes of giving her a second chance, he was mortified. For she had changed once again. She was now sick and had lost all of her hair.
Everyone changes multiple times throughout their life. There is not one person who can ever live up to the light-hearted wish at the end of every yearbook that says “Don’t ever change”.
