That is the saddest kind of regret.

It is a beautiful afternoon. 

A little grey hangs in the sky, but the heat of summer is still lingering, stubbornly refusing to leave. We are almost ready to say goodbye to it, almost ready to welcome autumn. I cannot see any birds crossing the sky, yet the red lights keep buzzing, blinking on and off as if the world has somewhere to go.

And I find myself wondering whether I have ever regretted any of this.

Sometimes I question whether all the good that came after was only a façade; whether all the things I learned were simply another form of denial; whether every new hope was only a distraction I placed carefully in front of an old wound.

I taught myself not to regret. I told myself that everything had meaning, that every loss had a lesson, that the only direction worth looking was forward.

But today, beneath this almost-autumn sky, I suddenly feel how small I am, a tiny piece of a world far greater than anything I could ever understand. 

How could I possibly know the larger mystery of what happened to me? How could I be certain that everything was necessary simply because I survived it?

So perhaps it is true. I think I do regret it sometimes.

And yet, does that really matter?

Maybe regret is not the question. Maybe what matters is whether I keep walking, or spend the rest of my life turning my head toward a road that has already disappeared behind me.

I once asked the other side whether being together had ever become a regret. The truth never came. Perhaps some truths are deliberately left in silence, because saying them aloud would only give another life to something already gone.

But there is one truth I know for myself.

If time ever folded backward and placed me at that beginning again, none of this would happen.

I would not dare to take even the smallest peek. I would not say hello. I would let you pass through my life like a stranger crossing the other side of the street, close enough to notice, distant enough to remain untouched.

Perhaps that is the saddest kind of regret.

Not wishing the ending had been different, but wishing there had never been a beginning. 

Still, the traffic lights keep changing. Summer is leaving whether I am ready or not.

And maybe courage is nothing grander than this. Carrying the memory without returning to it, admitting that I would choose differently while still choosing to continue.

So let it remain a passing by.

A brief crossing of two lives that should never have stopped for one another.

And someday, when another summer fades into another autumn, I hope I will look at the same grey sky and realize that I no longer remember exactly how much it once hurt.

I hope, by then, I will have moved on.