The Regret Diaries: The People We Choose
Mr. Wellings was a gentle man who somehow found himself in the center of a war, holding the highest rank, venerated for his quick mind and courage in battle despite never having had the heart to squash an ant before. Mr. Wellings entered the war like many do, due to a broken heart and a need to distance himself from humanity because he was convinced that living was a waste of time. He didn’t leave the war. He spent the next few decades in the forefront of a dozen conflicts in lands that he’d dreamt of visiting and in others whose names he wasn’t even sure of, even after having drank from their streams, bedded their women, and soiled their lands beyond repair. Somewhere in that time he met a woman who convinced him that what he needed was a family life to bring him back to the world. He had a son, Ben, with her and sat still for three years before he woke up one night, went into his closet, took a bag he’d hidden away, and left his family for the familiarity of a war in another land whose name he couldn’t remember.
Long story short, years passed, Mr. Wellings finally went back home, tugged by a guilty heart string and the faint pressures of age, and pleaded with his wife to enter their lives again. He was ready for the marvels of triviality and a humdrum existence where words were the swords of the day and night.
She looked at him with hatred and opened the doors because she hadn’t found another person willing to love a discarded woman. She despised him until the day she died a year later, taken away by an unspecified illness known to many as the ailment of disgruntled women. Mr. Wellings became a father to his son, but his son couldn’t ignore the time when his father chose people he did not know, a place he did not care about, and a cause he was unsure of, over him.
