Same Verse, Separate Song

Scenes of choices I didn’t know were wrong or right plague my past with pictures I can no longer stand to see.

Deep early hour conversations that sock the air out of my gut when I learn things have never been quite right, pushing past red flags with excuses to validate my desire for love.
Curled up in a knot beneath the covers, full of a cold that goes deeper than my bones.
When the phone goes silent, no matter how I will it to light with words to tell me we go on.
Hope stretched for years, quietly wishing for truth to unfold and him to choose me.
Realization wiping empty my heart when I land alone, ardent actuality unveiled of an incomplete desire becoming ash and smolder, embers of my envisioned life grown cold.

Waiting, always waiting, on the one with galaxy eyes and a canvas-painted view of the world.

I wish to wipe away the twinges of guilt, paths chosen that I believed would turn out right, and youthful hope within my heart for an elusive love I dared would come.

We can try all we want; still, when the world we fashion in our hearts isn’t meant to be, there is no amount of effort or well-meant surrender of our destiny that can breathe it to life.

Regret is a fresh fruit plucked repeatedly from the branch.

I regret the way I opened my heart, tentative as always to break beneath the surface of my scars once more, and yet the smile of him who set my hopes ablaze sprung wide across the expanse of sky in my dreams.

I had tentatively stepped into the wonder that is what if, and tumbled head over feet in lost dreams and sharp edges that sliced me in places I had carefully left exposed.

To regret my paths is to doubt God, that He can take my mess and make it clean. That He cannot come so close to what I have destroyed, what I wish was not, the acts of life that still roll over the film-strips of memory, how I long to change some of the parts of my story I opened myself to in attempt to find belonging. I cannot take back how naïve I was, how jaded I became when the pulp of my heart was ground and slain. And how it took forever to begin to try again, and what became of the same verse, separate song. ///

Regret is an old wound that festers, spills and refuses to heal.
These wounds remain intact, raw, callous. And I keep slicing myself on the same shard, reopen the same gash, watch tiny red pools swell and drop, swell and drop. We all have the capacity to never fully heal.

I can let these scales of sadness dry and tighten on my skin, encapsulate my decisions and see them disintegrate as one by one, I lose my happy ending, invite an endless mass of gray I cannot understand.

I could berate myself forever with questions that dig under what I most crave, itching at what is just beyond the reach of my soul’s hands.

How do I live with the constant pang of alone?
Why do I keep coming up short?
Am I never enough to make them stay?
Am I too much, my past too twisted, to truly be seen and chosen all the same?

This feeling of inadequacy sinks me low, takes air from my lungs and pushes me dangerously closer to the bottom. If I continue to store the what-might-have-been miseries within my glass breast, the weight will push and surge to burst my chest clear apart. Doubts assail my most sensitive bits, and I fight with every ounce of faith I have to prove myself worthy of love. That I am enough.

Please tell me I am enough.

Enough to find.
Enough to see.
Enough to give a happy ending at last.
I can be seen. I can be found.

And someday, these regrets will lead away from the ache to a burst of joy, as if seeing the sun after months of continuous night.

I blink, adjust my gaze, and unlatch my heart to take in that for I’ve waited long and true, unable to contain the wonder.

***

Continuing my attempt at the Five Minute Friday weekly writing challenge. Five minutes to write on the assigned topic. Raw and unedited. (Yikes!) This week’s topic: Regret.   /// symbolizes where five minutes stopped, and then I continued writing.