Regret By Anonymous

Regret.

All the words I've heard used to describe regret are wrong. It’s a sound… a pull… it’s a taste that I can never swallow down. That is what regret is.

You once laughed at my stupid, fallible, submissive ways. I watched myself transform in Your hands, more amazed by the transformation than You were. You punished me. You spoke quietly to me when I had disappointed You and I cried, and again I was amazed at how much I stretched and twisted and pushed myself from the inside out, just to transform for You, under Your gaze. I was a living, writhing, soul.

I'm a ghost now, haunting my past, and haunted by it. I pace my memories, but I can’t stay there long. So I look to the future which stretches before me, abstract and remote. I try to turn my face from the hopes I carefully tended, now run wild into a jungle of fantastical, lurid, chaotic confusion, beyond my reach and beyond my strength to cut down. I turn my eyes instead to the blank horizon.

My love, my indecision, my desire, my fear, my stupidity, my cowardice … they were all fragments that brought me here, to this place. But how do I return? What should I leave behind? What pillar of fire can I follow to escape these ruins of shadowy memories and hopes beyond my strength to contain? Or do I stop pacing at the edges of what I knew. Do I let go and let the wilderness swallow me. Perhaps I will reemerge somewhere else? What will I be, then? Who will I be?

Will I still hear that sound, feel that pull, have that taste of regret bitter in my mouth?

Yes, I know I will. So I don’t walk away. I can’t. I may be a ghost but I still want just as fiercely as I always did. I want to feel Your warmth, Your possession, Your grasp. It hurts. I want to again stretch and twist and writhe to transform for You, warm, alive and owned.

You owned me completely. There's so much more that we could have shared; that we should have shared.

So I wait, and want, and taste regret.