"Regret." (June 2017)
This post first appeared on my personal blog, which no longer exists, in June 2017.
Regret.
Unarguably one of the worst feelings in the world. Built and encouraged by its good friend hindsight, regret eats away at your soul until you’re holey and incomplete, knowing that you can’t undo something. A decision made, re-evaluated with an awakened mind that knows better but can’t change the past nonetheless. Forgiveness is a sweet taste that only lasts long enough to sway away in blissful moments where it feels like it might have not happened, only for guilt to give regret a piggyback and run straight back to you, tackling you down and punching you in the stomach.
And it’s hard to digest that it was actually you who made this mistake; it doesn’t feel like it should be, it feels like it was an out of body-experience which makes you now watch it back and wonder how it could have been. The wasted time between mistake and realisation, never to be re-obtained, haunting you when you least expect it. A sharp pain in the chest when your mind comes back from wandering off for a mere few careless moments.
And yet all you can do is try; try to make it up, try to get back to where you were, to walk back on the now uneven path, destroyed by force and time, only to arrive at a place that’s nothing like you left it.
Thumbnail Photo by Julia Bielawska on Unsplash