the regret of what ifs

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In the quiet nights of the melancholy silence, we become historians of the past we almost had a hold of. The past that couldn’t get a place in our life. We moved on from one timeline to another with regrets and a constant phrase fogging our brains: “what if”. It is the grief of possibility, something we almost had a future with, but the stars never got aligned. Our souls are still deep down buried with an infinite question of alternate reality starting with what ifs.

“what if I had chosen my passion?’’

“what if I had called one last time?’’

“what if I had said yes?’’

“what if I had waited?”

And with the ticking of the clock, they vaporise into the past. These aren’t regrets, these are the pain of a life we always wanted but we never waited enough to live it. They haunt us in our dreams, in our reality and even in our imagination as if calling us cowards. Cowards for not choosing them, cowards for rehearsing a conversation infinitely just to never have it, cowards to never choose our dream job & cowards to never take “the road less taken”.

The pain of almost haunts us deeply like a wound that never got time to heal itself. We feel it every day and sleep with a heart that sinks deeper into the pain of oblivion. The irony is that we never even try to erase it, maybe because it gives us the serenity that we think we deserved. Time becomes the only antagonist here, the way it was for Benjamin Button.

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We can never go back to the time to redo it and that’s the tragedy. This is where every legend falls, every story becomes a mystery, and every choice transforms into an option. We are defined by our choices, isn’t it?

Both the choices we choose and the ones we don’t. But the ones we don’t remain forever imprinted in the story of our book like a shadow never leaving us. The real fall is that we are allowed to imagine infinite futures, but we are just allowed to live one. One that can either haunt us or revive us. Like the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa once wrote,

“I carry within me all the dreams of the world”.

I cry over novels filled with nuances of romantic love and poetry. Love that was always meant to be but never got a chance, romance that fall back with the weight of responsibilities, devotion that deserved more strength to fight back and lastly fate that never aligned with the stars above. Cassius was wrong when he said, “the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves”. There are tragedies that has always been written in the fate of our stars.

“Life is simply a metaphor of what ifs surrendering to what is”.

I can never forget the time we spent; it was the happiest I ever was. You were the dream I prayed for, the life I wanted to sink in, the love where I lived but you simply became a loss that I can’t stop thinking about. Only if you would have stayed, only if you would have never lied and only if you would have fought for us. These what ifs are burning inside me every night like a fire with no solution. I still think about you like a shadow in search for its originality.

I have forgiven your lack of strength but how can I forgive myself for dreaming a life filled with happiness with you?

the home I dreamt with you, the places I wanted to travel with you, the hobbies I wanted to discover with, everything became a tragic memory that I neither can fulfill nor can I forget.

image credits: Pinterest