You Had Time

You like to think that the decisions you’ve made today will not manifest as regrets tomorrow. You hope, for the most part, that these numerous decisions made everyday – some big, some small, some momentous, and some painfully mundane- will not appear ridiculous in hindsight, ten days down the lane, or ten years. More often than not, sooner or later, you can always tell- and if you’re not the kind of moron who thinks she has no regrets like every celebrity ever interviewed- you can determine if that decision, all those months or years ago, was the right way to have gone. And if you try just hard enough, you can learn to surrender to the complete helplessness that is regret.

Sometimes, however, with some decisions- you can never tell. You hope, of course, that you did the right thing or you said the right lines- but like that idea that you thought was your best yet but slipped away from memory, you will never know. And while you try to go through life not pondering at length over these decisions- the ones shrouded in ambiguity, the ones on which the verdict is still out- this continuing illusion comes to a grinding halt sometimes and you feel the need to pause, and look back, and ask yourself if you’d made the right decision, if that was, indeed, the right thing to do.  And after you’ve asked yourself these difficult questions and groped for answers which simply do not exist, even as you’ve wondered how life would have turned out otherwise, and imagined all those alternative universes, you’ll come back, defeated, to the present, hoping that you’re not doing it wrong all over again.