What If

Those two words.

Uttered so many times they’ve lost all meaning.

Those two syllables, six letters, on repeat, like a record with a scratch, yet nobody to fix it.

A background noise in my mind, accompanying the embarrassing mistakes and failures of my past.

It’s easy to escape into them.

To use six puny letters to imagine how life would’ve gone had I not done something, or done it differently.

At times they’re addictive, those two words relieving the pain, shame, and guilt of past blunders and mistakes.

A morphine for the phantom pains.

Great while it lasts, devastating once it ends.

Because as the after effects of those two words fade away, cruel reality sets in.

There’s no, “what if,” in life. No second chances.

It’s easy to look back and imagine how things could have been different, but they’re not.

This is the way things are, the moment something is done, it’s immortal.

Carved into the past like words on a stone.

No redoes, no mulligans, no second tries.

Once something is done, it’s in the past, preserved for all eternity.

And we can try to gloss it over, to warp it in our minds and talk about what could have happened, what could have been.

But it didn’t happen that way. It happened the way it did.

And that’s just how it is.