2:45 am

on regret. . .

This stream meanders under the interstate, along an abandoned industrial area, finally emptying into the creek. I am not sure I will follow it the whole way. It isn’t far, I simply want to find a nice patch of grass to lie in to try to forget. I know that plan is a non-starter, but if I go home I will just be staring at the same walls I feel closing in on me day after day. At least in the grass the world doesn’t feel like a prison.

I fell in love once.

Okay twice.

Fine. It was a bunch of times, but reflecting on what I was feeling as a youth in comparison to what I know now, a lot of those falls seem foolish. They weren’t back then of course. They meant everything to my baby brain as it was happening. Some of those girls absolutely took my breath away. Some occupied my mind for years. One will carry my soul in her pocket through this life and the next.

And the next after that.

I have fallen in love with the idea of a person before even knowing who they were. I have fallen in love with a passionate lust and hoped it would lead to something deeper. I have fallen in love with people I thought would be there until my dying breath. I have even loved some who have never known I exist.

Perhaps none of these are love in a real sense but those feelings were intense. I am shaped by it. I felt foolish when I found a deeper, well rounded honest love, but I can’t deny my immature heart its experience. I have loved and been loved in a lot of strange and incongruent ways. They all meant something and they all helped me understand the kinds of love I think I need.

I don’t regret being foolish, but I do have regrets. People like to pretend like having regrets is a bad thing. Something about forgiving yourself, acceptance, about how everyone makes mistakes, but to me it just seems like justification for bad behavior. Not knowing any better doesn’t absolve you. It doesn’t mean you have to continually punish yourself for mistakes of the past but you shouldn’t put makeup on the scars left by regretful behavior.

You aren’t fooling anybody.

I regret how clumsily I handled the hearts people shared with me. Maybe I didn’t know any better but I still broke hearts. Being on the side of having my heart broken I know how terrible and how lasting that feeling is. Knowing I was the cause of someone losing trust or losing their ability to let another get close is another heartbreak I choose to feel because I don’t wipe it all away with “no regrets”.

I could sit back and placate my pain with ideas like things working out the way they were meant to. Divine plans and things. I can wrench justification into feeling okay for how things went because of how things are. Maybe I wouldn’t have the children I have if I made a single different choice along the way. Perhaps my rancid behavior needed to happen.

Or maybe it is all copium.

I imagine the way I let words fly there are people in my past who remember me as the asshole I can be. There are innumerable selfish choices I have made that ended up splashing negativity onto others. Most if it was not purposeful but accidents are not simply forgivable because they are thoughtless. A lot of my behaviors came from pain and I regret that my pain perpetrated pain in others.

And I know “sorry” doesn’t make it all better, but for anyone out there who caught scrapes in my wake, I am sorry.

I regret not taking the time to learn how to love. I made the mistake of thinking I could just treat others how I wanted to be treated. I forgot that other people need more than I learned to need. I didn’t understand that no one sees the world through my eyes and that my idea of love and friendship was not a universally shared definition.

It’s not about treating others how you want to be treated. It’s about treating others how they want to be treated.

Within reason of course. You can’t just cater to a psychopath narcissist because they demand it of you. I guess it is a blend. Two healthy people should be able to set boundaries and both express and receive love in ways that make sense.

Whatever.

Relationships are mostly a shitshow.

Not always, but successful long term relationships are rare. More times than not you end up losing yourself if you aim to please. Wants are incongruent, or at least as time passes they become so. What worked in the beginning doesn’t work as well a decade later. The lines between wants and needs begin to blur, and sooner or later someone else comes along that fills those wants in ways you need them to.

I regret the times when I looked for fulfillment elsewhere.

It was my first long term relationship and I was wrapped up in the idea that this sort of stuff doesn’t happen to a guy like me. I don’t get approached. I don’t get told under no uncertain terms what the approach will lead to. It led to indiscretion and a hangover that has lasted a lifetime, and I regret doing that to her, and to myself.

I regret the chain of girls that followed. The ones who couldn’t get close. The ones I liked but not much more. The ones I tried to love but couldn’t. I was faithful to them all but I wasn’t there. Not completely. I was off in the shadows, pretending I knew what I was doing.

Then a girl came along who punched right through. I didn’t even realize it at first. We tired and failed and tried and failed, but something kept bringing me back to that girl. Something kept bringing her back to me as well. We never could put it together in a real way but I still think of her from time to time. In retrospect it seems there was a barrier to a single honest conversation that would have set things straight.

I regret that we could never commit.

Then there was that girl. The one I fell for way too hard. The one I couldn’t keep at bay. The girl who reached into my chest and grabbed my heart in both hands. The girl I needed most at a time when I was in no position to be the man she needed me to be.

We lay in the grass together one day. We couldn’t be together but we both wanted to be. It was agony. Eventually we tried and it all fell apart. It was a heartbreak like I had never known and haven’t known since. I thought about that girl for years after it was all said and done. Lying in the grass tonight I think about her still.

I regret not fighting harder for her.

I regret more the feeling that she didn’t fight for me at all.

Then I met the girl I shouldn’t talk about. For no other reason than no words can encompass it. I don’t know if I regret anything or if someday I might. Nothing about her makes sense. My love for her in inexplicable. It is worlds beyond romantic. It transcends understanding. It is a calamity and a masterpiece at the same time.

I regret not telling her how I felt sooner.

I regret telling her how I felt when it was too late.

Then there is the mother of my children. The woman I married. The woman I injured with callousness. The woman who injured me back. The woman I can’t talk about because she deserves better. The woman where words will never explain it all. The woman who spawned more regrets than can be held in all the libraries in all the world.

So no. I don’t want to be absolved. I don’t want to just shrug away the memories of my missteps. Don’t get me wrong. I am not going to let them become a pile of stones I constantly carry around. I am not kicking myself in the balls every minute of every day wallowing in the past. I am not so fully ashamed at what I have done that I am paralyzed to live my life.

I simply need the sting to remind me of how my decisions can go sideways. I need the regret to color the way I make choices. Sometimes the choices lacks upside. Sometimes it is not about which is the right choice but about how much do you want to regret later. Knowing what regret I can live with makes it easy to follow through on tough options.

It would be easy to blame my parents, or my education, or something external. It would be easy to tell myself I did the best I could. I could say it was circumstance, or happenstance, or a lack of substance, some internal resistance, or a refusal to ask for assistance, but none of those are a stance I want to take.

I am a grown ass man.

I know what the fuck I am doing.

I also know pretty quickly when I am fucking up. Sometimes I just can’t stop myself. That “fuck it” muscle get’s engaged and there isn’t a whole lot that can slow that train. I know I am about to do something I will regret, but hell. Add it to the list. Cracking the top 10 of my regrets would take something epic.

I hope if it ever happens someone is there to take video.

One thing is for sure, I will probably regret laying in this grass out here in a derelict industrial space. It would be my luck to walk out of here covered in ticks. Lyme disease here I come.

Just five more minutes. The grass feels nice.

I have a lifetime left to regret it if life so chooses.