Shared Melancholy of Unfinished Ideas

I am a compulsive idea collector. Over years, I have scribbled ideas on pretty much every surface I have touched. They’re mostly lame, some worse. A tiny fraction are worth typing into Google. As I press enter, I hope that my yearning is validated by the internet.

Sometimes I find the same idea I have, proposed by someone else, two months or ten years ago on Reddit. Comments bashing it, or calling it possible. Some discussions dig deep and stretch for weeks. Then silence. One day the discussion stops and the visionary moves on with life. Thread marked archived.

I experience a strange melancholy when I see this. Because there was a moment when someone full of life tied their dreams to a balloon and made a jump for the parallel world, and landed back in the same place. I notice it because I’ve been him.

My ideas come from a parallel world that I could not enter. A world that I would’ve preferred to live in, where I didn’t have to think of that idea. Where it existed without me trying to thump its chest into life.

You could argue that nothing was lost, since it never existed. Yet it feels like a tiny death. When a part of me had to be gotten rid of because it didn’t belong to the world it lives in, and doesn’t know how to reach where it can breathe.

I feel a yearning to meet them, those who wished the same tender things from the universe. Those who were held at the gates. I want to go hold their hand at the moment they needed someone to trust in them. I recognize these perfect strangers, who I know, if they existed around me, could’ve been my best friends. Because maybe we would’ve found in each other what we couldn’t get from the world we didn’t get to live in.