The One That Got Away

“I didn’t go.”

That’s the sentence that has haunted Indian filmmaker Shekhar Kapur for decades. Three simple words that changed the trajectory of his entire life. On a morning in Ibiza, with salt air filling his lungs and a nameless girl begging him to sail away to South America, he made the choice that would follow him forever.

He didn’t go.

The story Kapur shared on social media reads like something he might script for his next film—two young people, boats docked side by side in an old Mediterranean port, a sunrise that should have meant beginning but felt like ending. She was eighteen, maybe. He was twenty-two. They never asked each other’s names because when you fall in love at that age, names don’t matter. Only ‘right now’ does.

“Come with us,” she said as her family prepared to set sail down the South American coast. A year of adventure stretched ahead of them. His friends shrugged when he asked if he could abandon their boat for hers. Why not? They were all drifters then, carried by youth and endless possibility.

But something held him back. Fear? Practical thinking? The weight of an unmade decision? Whatever it was, it kept his feet planted on his deck while hers sailed away into what he calls “the most heartbreaking sunrise ever.”

Years later, in 2025, sitting on a flight to New York, life came full circle in the strangest way. A fellow passenger mentioned meeting “a very charming Indian boy” on a boat in Ibiza, many years ago. The universe, it seems, has a sense of irony.

When love stories stay unfinished

We all have that story. The one that got away. The train we didn’t catch. The number we didn’t call. The DM we never opened. The door we didn’t knock on. These incomplete love stories burrow deeper into our hearts than the ones with wedding bells and happy endings.

Rick knew this in Casablanca when he told Ilsa, “We’ll always have Paris.” Their love became immortal precisely because it was sacrificed. Had they run away together, had they chosen differently, would we still remember them eighty years later? Probably not. It’s the ache of separation that makes their story eternal.

The most famous dialogue on love from Vicky Cristina Barcelona captures this paradox perfectly through the character Juan Antonio: “Only unfulfilled love can be romantic.” These words could have been spoken about Kapur's boat girl, about Rick and Ilsa, about any love that lives in the space between possibility and reality.

Then there’s Truman and Sylvia in The Truman Show. Their entire relationship lasted maybe ten minutes of screen time, but it drove thirty years of Truman’s life. One brief encounter on a beach, a few stolen moments before she was dragged away from him, and suddenly every decision Truman makes is shaped by the memory of a girl who whispered ‘They’re watching us’ and tried to tell him the truth about his artificial world.

We never find out if Truman reaches Fiji to find her. The movie ends with him walking through that door into the real world, but we’re left wondering: Did he find Sylvia? Or had she, like Kapur’s boat girl, become more powerful as a memory than she ever could have been as reality? The genius of that ending is perhaps its incompleteness. 

The science of what if

There’s a reason these unfinished stories stick with us while completed ones fade. Psychologists call it the Zeigarnik Effect, our brains obsess over incomplete tasks while quickly forgetting finished ones. The song cut short by static haunts us all day. The conversation, interrupted by a dropped call, replays endlessly in our minds. The perfectly pleasant dinner with friends? Forgotten by Wednesday.

Strangers hold special power in our memories, too. They see us without baggage, without knowing our worst habits or biggest failures. In their eyes, we exist in pure potential. Kapur’s ‘boat girl’ never learned about his future struggles or his battles in Hollywood. She saw only a young man brave enough to sail the Mediterranean, romantic enough to fall in love under foreign stars.

This is why first meetings feel electric while long marriages sometimes feel routine. The stranger sees our best self because it’s all they know of us.

Matt Haig explores this beautifully in The Midnight Library, where his protagonist visits infinite versions of her life based on different choices. Each alternate reality springs from a single moment of decision...or indecision. The book suggests our unrealised lives don’t disappear; they live alongside us like parallel stories, whispering “what if” in quiet moments.

Kapur’s story resonates because we’ve all stood on that dock. Maybe it wasn’t a boat to South America. Maybe it was a job offer in Tokyo. A first date that terrified you. A cross-country move that felt too risky. A conversation you needed to have but never did.

During World War II, nurses and soldiers exchanged thousands of letters across oceans. Many relationships existed entirely on paper…passionate, profound, sometimes lasting years without the writers ever meeting face to face. When the war ended, some couples finally met and married. Others never connected again, leaving love letters as the only evidence of what might have been.

When stories come full circle

The strangest part of Kapur’s tale isn’t the missed connection; it’s what happened decades later on that flight to New York. Life has a way of circling back, of offering us glimpses into our alternate histories.

As Kapur wrote: “I always wondered. What if I had just taken that one step from my boat to hers? I wanted to … really wanted to, she implored me. I didn’t. Where would I have been today? … sailing down the coast of South America … perhaps not a filmmaker … but perhaps even something more exciting. And her? Where was she now?” 

Sitting across from him, the woman who remembered meeting “a charming Indian boy” in Ibiza might have been his boat girl, grown older. Or maybe she was someone else entirely, and the universe was just having a laugh.

Either way, that moment on the plane must have felt like stepping through time. How many of us have had similar experiences? Running into someone from our past in an airport. Hearing a song that brings back a specific night, a specific person. Finding a dry four-leaf clover tucked inside a book.

These moments remind us that our lives are more connected than we realise. That the stories we think are finished might still be writing themselves.

The beauty of incomplete stories

Here’s what Kapur understood when he shared his story: incomplete love stories aren’t tragedies but gifts. They remind us that life is full of possibility, that we contain multitudes, that there are infinite versions of ourselves we’ll never meet but somehow know exist.

The girl who sailed to South America became more than a person. She became a symbol of adventure, of youth, of roads not taken. In Kapur’s memory, she stays eighteen forever, full of possibility, forever asking him to come with her. Had he gone, had they built a life together, she might have become ordinary. Human. Real in all the messy, complicated ways real relationships are.

Instead, she remained perfect in her incompleteness. “We held each other for as long as we could … didn’t stop looking at each other as her boat left the shore. It was the most heartbreaking sunrise ever.”

Shekhar Kapur made his choice that morning in Ibiza. He stayed put, watched love sail away, and spent decades wondering “what if”. But here’s the thing about wondering: it keeps possibilities alive. It keeps us believing that somewhere, in some version of our story, we were brave enough to step across the gap between one boat and another.

And maybe, in the end, that’s the most beautiful love story of all, the one written not in certainty, but in the endless, aching space of ‘maybe’.

The sunrise should have been beautiful. Instead, it became unforgettable.