Regret

I am imagining myself five years from now.


 I am sitting at a train station somewhere in Europe, waiting to be transported to God-knows-where. I look at the strangers passing by and enjoy their strangeness. I catch myself and realize that I am the strange one here. I am like a shrub horribly mixed up with gigantic trees. I look like an Asian junior high school student lost in the metropolis and can't hope of asking help because she doesn't speak English. But I speak great English, probably better than most people here. Perhaps I'm in Belgium. Or Brussels.


I heave out a sigh and revel in the visible puff of air that comes out. It's cold, so it must be nearing winter or something. I search the faces before me, and I see him appear like the dream that he always was—fragile and susceptible to dissolution. A feeling creeps all over me, overriding the alien feeling one is wont to get when they are million miles away from home. I smile at the association and realize that I still love him after all this time. His cheeky, awkward self.


I want to remember memories that lovers remember when they're apart: walks while holding hands, kisses, gentle touches, the whole compendium of the clichéd and the romantic. But another feeling washes over me, something sharp and heavy and painful. I don't remember us ever being lovers. We were just friends, always just friends. I feel my eyes sting with tears, and I let them fall because I deserve it. I deserve to cry over our could-have-beens because it's partly my fault. 


The feeling ebbs and slowly fades, giving way to the numbness that has allowed me to be here and pretend that I'm happy being alone. The word that I don't want to say hangs on my lips, begging me desperately to let it go. I decide against recognizing it, but it's there. It's there when I eat in a restaurant by myself. It's there when I sit on a park bench and unintentionally observe lovers being lovers. It's there when I look at pictures and remember conversations over beer and cocktails. It's here now, sitting on my chest, suffocating me softly. I open my mouth and my tongue hesitantly slides against my palate. 


"Regret."


The train finally arrives, and I am back on a swivel chair, rapping on a keyboard.