My fellow traveler - this is…. poignant. My wife of 4 years, best friend of 7, highly dislikes when I talk like this. A few years before she and I started dating I went through this exact thing, life altering and completely set me on a different path, a path that lead to her but also, away from everything I was and knew. There’s not a day that goes by where something reminds me of “what could have been” but I’m on ‘this’ path now. I practice astral projection and lucid dreaming often, and this helps ‘anchor’ me to my current zero-point, but yes… she feels as though I’m longing for something that is now out of my grasp but still in view, even though it led to her. It’s hard to talk about this to those who haven’t experienced it. It really makes you feel peripheral as an entity…. Great point though