Shared melancholy of unfinished ideas

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.

I am an aggressive idea collector. Over years, I have scribbled ideas on pretty much every surface I have touched. They’re mostly bad, even lame. 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 - 2 months or 10 years ago on Reddit. Comments bashing it, or calling it valid. 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, but landed back in the same place. I notice it because I’ve been him. 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 wishes from the universe. Those who were told no. I want to go back in time and hold their hand when they needed someone to trust in them. I want to share this loneliness with these perfect strangers, who I know, if 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.