The Person I Almost Became

The Person I Almost Became

When I was 23, I nearly moved to Chicago.

It wasn’t part of some grand life plan, or a decision fueled by ambition. It was because of a boy. Or, more accurately, a man who made me believe for a season that my life might be different, lighter, sharper around the edges. His name was Luke, and he had eyes the color of storm clouds before rain. He talked about things like architecture and dive bars and how Lake Michigan could fool you into thinking it was the ocean if you squinted. I was a fresh college graduate with a job offer I didn’t care about and a lingering suspicion that the life I’d built so far wasn’t really mine.

Luke made everything sound possible.

He said, “You could move here. There’s an opening at my company. We could share an apartment. You’d love it. You could be anyone here.”

And for about two weeks in the autumn of 2013, I believed him.

I pictured a version of myself that wore thrifted leather jackets and learned to drink whiskey without wincing. Someone who knew all the shortcuts through the city and had a favorite diner that stayed open past midnight. I imagined Sunday mornings with jazz records playing in a small apartment with crooked blinds, and weeknights spent among people who didn’t know the girl I’d been in my hometown — the one too cautious, too obedient, always a little afraid to color outside the lines.

I wanted to be her, the Chicago version of me. The one who ran toward things instead of away.

But here’s the thing about almost-decisions: they hover around your life like ghosts, quietly shaping the person you do become. I didn’t take the job. I didn’t move. I let the imagined version of myself flicker out like a match in the wind.

I stayed.

I took a safe marketing job in the suburbs. I dated a kind man who was nothing like Luke — steady, patient, the kind of person who makes plans six months in advance and actually follows through. I moved into a small, sunlit apartment with no fire escape, no view of the city skyline, but a balcony where I learned to keep plants alive. I built a life from soft, steady things: weekend farmers’ markets, old novels, Saturday hikes, dinners with people who’d known me since high school.

It wasn’t the life I’d pictured at 23. It wasn’t dramatic or particularly bold. It didn’t feel like a movie soundtrack kind of life. But over time, I realized it was a life I’d chosen, inch by inch, instead of chasing a fantasy version of myself I’d invented for someone else.

Years later, on a trip to Chicago for a friend’s wedding, I passed a street that looked achingly familiar from Luke’s stories. The bars were still there, the lake still pretending to be an ocean, the sharp smell of the city in the wind. I thought about her — that version of me who never came to be. I wondered if she would’ve been happier. Braver. If she would’ve made mistakes worth remembering.

And I realized something: I carry her with me. Not as a regret, but as a reminder. Of the roads not taken, the almost-loves, the versions of ourselves we dream up in borrowed cities under borrowed skies.

I never saw Luke again after that autumn. Our last conversation was scattered, the kind where both people know they’re saying goodbye without saying it out loud. He told me I should follow my gut. I think, in the end, we both did.

And while my life never became what I thought it might be at 23, it became mine. It’s stitched together with the people I chose, the small quiet moments that no one else will remember but me. It’s marked by near-misses and gentle surprises, and the knowledge that we are always, in some way, a collection of the people we almost became.

I’m not the girl in the leather jacket, walking along Lake Michigan at midnight. But sometimes, when the air turns sharp and restless in early autumn, I think of her. And I hope, in whatever alternate timeline she exists, she’s doing okay.

Because in this one, so am I.