Maybe perhaps someday we’ll look back and think of the possibilities that could have happened but did not. That maybe we have been floating in a dream all this time and reality had ceased to exist.
I whisper it like an excuse, like if I say it softly enough the universe will mistake it for a prayer and grant me a different version of my life.
Outside my window, the day is sinking into evening with the slow, resigned grace of something that’s tired of trying. The sky turns the color of old bruises—lavender, then slate, then that deepened purple that looks almost beautiful if you don’t stare too long. Wind scrapes at the glass like it wants in. Like it wants to ask me what I’m doing with all this time I begged for when I was younger.
Back then, I thought choices were doors.
I didn’t understand they could be traps.
In the quiet, I can hear the smallest things: the refrigerator’s hum, the old pipes breathing, my own heartbeat trying to pretend it’s not exhausted. The room is neat in the way depression makes you—because if the outside is organized, maybe the inside will stop collapsing. I’ve stacked my regrets like books I’ll never finish. I’ve folded my sadness into clean corners. I’ve learned to make my life look livable from a distance.
But up close, everything is heavy.
I keep replaying the years like a film I can’t stop pausing at all the wrong scenes. The moments where I could have turned left instead of right. The conversations where I should have spoken up. The times I stayed when I should have left, or left when I should have stayed. The opportunities I let slip because I was afraid, because I didn’t think I deserved them, because I thought I had more time.
Time—what a liar.
It moved forward whether I was ready or not. It swallowed my best intentions and spat out the consequences. And now I’m here, sitting in the aftermath of myself, wondering how many of my current wounds have my own fingerprints on them.
The worst part is I can name them.
I can trace the shape of this depression back to choices I made while convincing myself I was doing my best. I can point to the year I stopped trying because failure became familiar. To the day I chose comfort over growth and called it “self-preservation.” To the months I ignored the small alarms in my body and mind because I didn’t want to admit I was falling apart.
I told myself I was fine.
I was not fine.
Sometimes I think about the person I used to be—before the heaviness set in like weather, before waking up felt like dragging an entire ocean behind me. I see them in my mind like a photograph left too long in the sun: their edges blurred, their smile faded, but still somehow there. They look at me like they’re waiting for an explanation.
And I don’t have one that doesn’t sound like an apology.
If I could undo it, I would.
I would go back to the moment I chose the wrong thing because it was easier. I would grab my own shoulders and shake some courage into my bones. I would tell myself to stop romanticizing suffering. To stop calling survival “living.” To stop waiting for someone else to save me from a life I keep actively building with my own fear.
But time doesn’t rewind. It doesn’t soften because you’ve learned your lesson. It just keeps going, like a train that doesn’t care if you missed your stop. And all I can do now is stare at the tracks behind me and wonder what it would have been like to arrive somewhere else.
There’s a specific kind of grief in regretting your own choices.
It doesn’t come from losing someone. It comes from losing yourself—bit by bit, decision by decision—until one day you realize you don’t recognize the person you’ve become. You wake up and think, How did I get here? and the answer is a long list of moments you can’t undo.
I try to do normal things, because normal things are supposed to anchor you. I brush my teeth. I answer texts hours later. I take showers that feel like rituals in a religion I don’t believe in. I eat because I know I’m supposed to, though food tastes like cardboard and guilt. I go outside sometimes and let the air touch my skin, hoping it will remind me I’m real.
But the depression follows me like my shadow—quiet, faithful, patient.
It sits beside me when I watch other people live their lives like it’s easy. It curls in my chest when I see someone succeed at something I abandoned. It crawls into my throat when I think about how I used to have dreams, and now I can’t even make plans without feeling the weight of failure already draped over them.
I wonder if I made the right choices—if I had been braver, wiser, less reckless with my own future—would I still be here?
Would I still feel like a ghost haunting my own life?
Would my mornings look different?
Would my mind be kinder?
The questions come in waves, and I never have answers, only that aching certainty that somewhere in an alternate timeline I am okay. Somewhere there’s a version of me who didn’t self-sabotage. Who didn’t choose the wrong people and the wrong habits and the wrong coping mechanisms. Who didn’t confuse numbness for peace.
Somewhere I am lighter.
And that thought is both comfort and cruelty—because it proves I can imagine a better life, I just can’t reach it.
Sometimes, late at night, I sit on the floor because it feels like the closest thing to surrender I can manage. The darkness wraps around me like a blanket that doesn’t ask questions. I hold my knees and press my forehead against them, as if I can fold myself small enough to disappear from the consequences of my own decisions.
I tell myself I should have known better.
But knowing better is a luxury you only get after.
Back then, I was just trying to make it through the day. I was just trying to choose something—anything—that didn’t hurt too much in the moment. I didn’t realize some choices are slow poison. I didn’t realize “later” arrives with receipts.
And now, I wake up and I pay for everything.
I pay with exhaustion. With emptiness. With the constant sense that I am behind, that I am late to my own life, that everyone else got a map and I somehow missed the distribution.
I pay with the way my mind talks to me—sharp, relentless, unforgiving.
Look what you did.
Look where you are.
Look at what you ruined.
I wish I could offer myself tenderness the way I offer it to everyone else. I wish I could be gentle about the fact that I was human, that I made choices with the information and pain I had at the time. But depression is not gentle. Depression is a narrator that edits your entire life into a tragedy and calls it truth.
Still…
Even in this, there are moments that feel like a thin thread of light. A song that makes my chest loosen for three minutes. A stranger’s laugh in a grocery aisle. The way the sky keeps changing its colors, as if it hasn’t given up on beauty.
And sometimes, when I’m brave enough, I admit something else, something quieter and harder:
Maybe I can’t undo what I chose.
Maybe I can’t go back and become the version of me that made all the right decisions.
But maybe I can stop making the same ones.
That thought scares me more than sadness sometimes, because it means responsibility. It means the future is still mine to touch. It means I can’t blame the past forever, even if the past is heavy and familiar and easier to hold than hope.
I look at my hands in the dim light. They don’t look like hands that can build a new life.
But they are the only ones I have.
So I return to the sentence I started with, the one that keeps circling me like a moth around a dying bulb:
Maybe perhaps someday we’ll look back.
Someday this won’t feel like a prison, just a chapter. Someday I will forgive the person I was for trying to survive the only way they knew how. Someday I will stop living in “what if” and start living in “what now.”
But tonight, I am still here—tired, aching, full of regrets that weigh more than my own body.
And I don’t know how to undo my life.
I only know how to sit with it.
To breathe through it.
To keep existing in the aftermath of my choices, even when existing feels like a kind of punishment.
And in the quiet, with the sky bruising into night, I let myself say the truth without flinching:
I wish I had made different decisions.
I wish I had saved myself sooner.
I wish I wasn’t here.
But I am.
