Dance #6: Regret

What might have been? Those four words coalesce quite innocently to assemble again that aching, impossible question. The phantasmic you bounds helplessly after the rapidly unravelling yarn, chasing its every whim, this way and that, until you look back at the tangled mess of hypotheticals and wonder what you've become. Is this what you wanted? Has any of this panned out the way you wanted? But surely, everything would have been different? If only this—if only that. You can picture clearly now how things might have been... But this is not what pains you. The torture is the suggestion that you might—on some level—have always known.

Maybe your perspective just changed. Or perhaps you clasped what you had so tightly, became so used to it that you were afraid to lose it? Was it safer to stick with what you knew? "Every day you get a little older until, one day, the strange becomes mundane". The ghosts of alternate presents sit all around you, and you tremble, unable to keep from stealing glances at them. What might have been?