Between dream and time

There is a longing that is rarely spoken aloud. It is not for the lived past, nor for childhood, nor for the places we have visited. It is a paradoxical longing: the longing for what never happened.

It manifests in interrupted moments, in meetings that never took place, in words that remained caught in the throat. It lives in the glance that could have changed a life but moved on. In the loves that were born timid but never broke through the silence. In the friendships that were lost before they could even take root.

Fernando Pessoa once wrote that “everything that lives does not live because it lives, but because it dreams”. Within each of us lies a collection of unrealized dreams — and it is precisely from them that this nostalgia for the unlived is born. It is not the pain of loss, but the recognition that life is larger than any personal chronology.

Nietzsche said that every decision is also a renunciation: by choosing one path, we abandon countless others. And it is in this space of unmade choices that this peculiar absence settles. What could have been, but never was, follows us like a silent shadow. Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, described it powerfully: life happens only once, and this unrepeatability makes it both light and unbearable.

This longing for the unlived reminds us that life is a field of possibilities. We are shaped as much by the experiences we had as by those we never had. The paths we refused also mold who we are, even if invisibly. We are, to some extent, made of aborted choices, suspended gestures, stories that never came to be.

And, curiously, this longing does not need to be bitter. In many cases, it is serene — an acceptance that we could not possibly contain within us all the possibles. Perhaps wisdom lies precisely in understanding that real life is made of gaps, silences, missed opportunities, and that even what never was becomes part of our identity.

Between dream and time, there exists this invisible territory of absences. It is there we discover that the meaning of life is not limited to what happened. We are also made of what we did not live — and that is why even what never existed can still accompany us as memory.

São Paulo/SP/BR, September 15th 2025