The Application Form From Seventeen Years Ago, and the Question of "What If"

The sheet was tucked into a blue folder and had gone the color of weak tea. Moths had chewed the top edge into a little saw blade. My handwriting on the first line was still clear: the name of a degree, its code, four digits. One diagonal stroke of blue ballpoint ran straight through all of it. The stroke was heavy-handed, because at seventeen I had not yet learned to cross things out gently.

I was holding it between the aluminum ladder and the air-conditioner filter, still wet, water dripping onto the top of my foot. It was a Sunday morning and I had come to my mother's house to clean her unit. Repairing air conditioners for a living and letting your own mother's machine rattle like a cargo trike would be embarrassing. The folder had been sitting on top of the wardrobe, right where I reached for the screwdriver I had dropped.

"What have you got there?"

My mother stood at the bottom of the ladder, still holding the ladle from the soup.

"My application form from when I took the university exams. Why did you keep it?"

"Oh, I thought that was lost. I put that folder in with the old household registration book. Come down and eat your noodles, they're getting cold."

I did not come down right away. I stood on the ladder and read a piece of paper whose writer had become somebody else.

One thing first, so nobody carries the wrong idea into this. This story is not about whether choosing differently would have turned out better or worse. I do not know, and nobody does. It is also not saying that regret is a mistake, or that what is over should simply be dropped. Some regrets sit quietly inside a person for years and harm no one. This is only about one moment when I saw what my own regret was being built out of.

What does that other life look like at three on a Tuesday afternoon?

About a month before that Sunday I had gone to install an air conditioner in a newly built house for a woman named Hạnh. She offered me a glass of iced tea and told me to sit down. On the dining table lay a roll of floor plans, held flat at both ends by two rice bowls, with a soft pencil sharpened to a slant beside it. I drank my tea with my eyes parked on those lines: where the light well went, where the staircase turned so the kitchen could have the light.

I sat there longer than I needed to. Hạnh asked, "Quang, is the unit done?" and I jumped to my feet and said yes, done.

That night, and many nights after, riding my motorbike back to the shop, the sentence kept returning. What if back then I had left the first choice alone. And a film started up in my head, very smooth: me in a rolled-sleeve shirt standing on a building site, cement dust on my shoes, somebody calling "Architect, sir," my hand holding that exact pencil. The film even had music. I replayed it the way people replay an advertisement they like.

One night I asked myself, a little irritated:

"All right. What is the next scene?"

"Well... I'm standing on the building site."

"Doing what? At three on a Tuesday afternoon."

I could not answer. The film held only the best days of the other life. It had no Tuesday in it.

People usually assume they miss the other life because it was better than this one. It sounds right, and anyone could say it. When I sat down and picked it apart, I found something a little different. That life looked so good only because I had never lived one ordinary day inside it. It was built from what the form promised: the name of the degree, the drafting table, the way people would address me. It was missing everything that makes up a day: a client's message arriving while I eat, an aching back, a dull meeting, the afternoon I would have hated the job. I was comparing a whole day, with everything in it, against a poster.

And underneath that was something harder to look at. Keeping "what if" gave me somewhere to go whenever today did not suit me. On a slow afternoon at the shop, with the electricity bill up and a young employee gone without a word, I would turn into that room and sit for a while. Nobody called me there. There was no copper pipe to braze. As long as the room stayed open, I did not have to face this: I had chosen, the choice had its price and its gain, and both were real.

You will not know you did it right by feeling relieved. You will know by how many lines you underlined. The more underlining, the thinner that other life is than you thought, and that is something to see, not something to fix.

The first time, it took me half an hour to write six lines. Three o'clock I could still imagine: me on scaffolding, sun straight on the back of my neck. By seven in the evening I stalled. I did not know what I rode home on, which part of town I lived in, whether anyone had cooked dinner for me. It felt strange, like opening a door and finding only a painted wall. A week later "what if" still came back, but shorter and quieter. Some people have told me they felt lighter that same night, and others felt emptier than before. I was in the first group, but the second is perfectly normal too.

On a busy day, do the short version: write just one line, what you are holding in your hand at three on a Tuesday in the other life. If you cannot write that line in thirty seconds, that alone is enough to show what has been running.

The first mistake I made, and it sounded perfectly reasonable, was making the other life worse so I would miss it less. I wrote: surely I would be tired there too, in debt too, surely not happier. It is tempting because it sounds like comfort, and I tried it for exactly one night. By morning I no longer believed myself, because I had just invented another film, only a dark one. Inventing in the opposite direction is still inventing. What is worth doing is leaving the "not known" places honestly unknown, neither brightened nor darkened.

Which part of that form can I still hold?

That evening I did something in a hurry. I got back to the shop, pulled the shutter halfway down, sat in front of my phone and looked up how many years it would take to study architecture again, whether evening classes were possible. By the third paragraph I closed it. I was not a thirty-five-year-old weighing a decision. I was a seventeen-year-old who had just been handed back a piece of paper, scrambling to fix it before daylight.

What I tend to overlook is that regret wants to be settled immediately, so it turns me into a man who makes big decisions at ten at night. And a big decision at ten at night is usually the regret's decision, not mine.

I put the phone away and sat still. The shop smelled of old plastic and copper pipe. On the table lay a coil of spare wire and the sheet of paper where I had drawn a pipe layout for a customer that afternoon, in ballpoint, on the back of an invoice.

I looked at that sheet for a long time.

Why had I chosen architecture years ago? Not because of the words "architect." I remembered now: in eleventh grade I would sit a whole afternoon with a sheet of lined paper and a plastic ruler, drawing the floor plan of our house, then the neighbors' house, then the alley. I asked my mother, "Why didn't we put a window here?" What I loved then was the drawing hand, the ruler, the little squares. No degree stood in between.

The form named a road. But what I wanted was not a road, it was a verb. To draw. The road had closed, or at least I did not want to open it again just then. The verb had never closed. It was lying right there on my table, in ballpoint on the back of an invoice.

So letting go here does not mean wiping out everything the seventeen-year-old wanted so the pile looks tidy. People often assume letting go means throwing away the whole bundle. To me it feels more like separating: setting down the word "should have," keeping the hand that likes to draw. There is a whole piece on letting go is not giving up, and this separating belongs right there.

How will you know you did it right? If the small task makes you want five more minutes instead of wanting it finished, you are heading the right way. If you do it with the feeling of handing in homework, choose a different task.

The next day I took a sheet of lined paper and drew my mother's house plan. At first my hand was clumsy, the walls came out curved, the kitchen stretched three steps too far outside. My mother looked over my shoulder:

"We don't have a pillar there."

"I drew it crooked."

"Yes, crooked. But it looks a lot like us."

After a week I had drawn my grandmother's house, then the shop. Not for any reason. Some people will find this far too small for seventeen years of regret, and that is also true. I can only say what I saw: the regret did not vanish, but it had less room to take up a whole evening alone.

On busy days I drew a single square: the table in the shop, seen from above, five minutes. Some days I finished and felt no different, and that was fine.

The next place I nearly went wrong was turning this small task into a contest: I must draw like a real architect, buy a T-square, buy A3 paper. It is tempting because I wanted the small thing to be "worthy" of the large regret. But that very wanting made the hand stop wanting to draw. Keep it cheap and clumsy. The old ballpoint is enough.

If you try it and "what if" keeps coming back

Two reasons turn up often, and both are ordinary.

First: this regret may not live only in the form. Sometimes an old piece of paper is just the excuse for a different sadness to step out, about a person, a time, something never said. If the exercise brushes against another place, much bigger, follow that place instead of forcing yourself to finish. And if the sadness or emptiness lasts for weeks, making it hard to eat, sleep or work, talk to someone with professional training. That is not a failure of the exercise, only a weight heavier than an exercise can carry. If at any point you think about hurting yourself, go to Emergency Support right away.

Second: some people finish the small task and find it pointless, because what they truly want is the road, not the verb. That may well be true. The question then changes completely: no longer "how do I stop missing it" but "do I want to walk that road now." That is a decision, and it deserves a clear morning and someone sitting next to you, not ten o'clock at night. There is a piece on laying down expectations of a perfect life that covers part of this ground, if you need somewhere to start.

As for the form, I slid it back into the blue folder and put the folder on top of the wardrobe. Not face down, not thrown away, not framed. The following weekend I stopped by my mother's house again, and on the kitchen table lay a new sheet of lined paper that was hers, with a window sketched crudely in the spot where, in her opinion, the house was lacking one.

May you have an evening to sit quietly with a sheet of paper of your own.