Speckled Green

Regrets are a powerful thing. They haunt you continuously. You are never really free of them. They’ll find some way to come back to you, whether as an old regret, or as a new one, freshly made from your choices. For hours, days and weeks, you sulk, brood and think over them, they take your every waking moment, sliding to the back for a moment as you talk to someone, before returning the moment your attention wanes.

As they enter the crazy workings of your mind, they bloat, and befuddle you. If you have a simple mind, they are alarmingly obvious. In the complex mind, they become part of the confusion, quickly working they way to the front, seeking your attention. You try to work them out. Possibilities abound. You go back to the choices you feel made them, and try to imagine if you had done something else, it would’ve been different. It becomes repetitive, frequent, and confusing.

Regrets also move in on your heart. They hammer away at it, cause an ache you just can’t seem to remove, and ache you can’t block off from your mind. If it finds some guilt, it invites it along and gets it to hammer away as well. It beats and beats and beats, hurting you for as long as possible, as hard as it can.

The bigger the issue is in your life, the harder it hammers. The longer it hammers. The worse it feels. The more consuming it is.

And when you see, hear or do something relating to the regret, up wells the pain, the confusion and the regrets.

It won’t leave you, not until you find an end which will appease it. For some, that would mean the rest of their life. Others, a (sometimes seemingly) long time.

Sometimes you might be lucky. It might fade with time, as things change, you move on or forget, or something bigger dwarfs it. Sometimes you’re not.

I’m sure all you people reading this have had regrets. I know I have.