On Regret


On Instagram, all my senior compatriots seem to be mourning the loss of their futures. They post long-winded rants about how they’ve been deprived of their prom, their graduation, their blissfully loose days of senior spring. 

And to some extent, I suppose I do too. I feel that same resigned sense of loss, the kind that must be inevitable for anyone who’s had a whole trimester of high school — the supposedly best trimester, at that — cut out of his life. I guess I will never experience for myself all those legendary promises of senior spring: sunbathing mindlessly on the Mem quad; sneaking off to the waterfall with friends; slowing down and taking a breath, for once, in a painfully demanding high-school career.

But, with some time to introspect, I suppose all my lamentations about the senior spring I lost don’t come from missing the future. I don’t think I’m grieving over all the memories of the life I would have lived in the spring — how do you do that for something that hasn’t happened yet? — but instead, something else. After all, thinking about it, senior spring is abstract a concept to me as attending Hogwarts or meeting @joanpala. Sure, I’m sad I didn’t get to experience those things, but my circumstances never dictated that I would, anyway. I don’t have strong feelings tied to a possibility that I never had in the first place, so I can’t really say I’m missing out on too much.

Rather, with time to think, I find myself awash with another breed of sadness: regret. A deeply painful regret, one that, in the most ordinary of times — while I’m cooking a meal, brushing my teeth — rams into my system painfully, like a midnight train speeding on a track. 

Regret: Of not having become the person I wanted to be. Of not having done the things the optimistic, sophomore-year version of myself pledged to do. Of not having taken those risks I said I would take. My life teemed, once, with endless possibilities, countless ways to manifest itself. But now — at the risk of sounding dramatic — those opportunities are no more.

I received a letter a while back. It was a ten-page series of journal entries about me, written by my friend over the course of six months. Through this series of ruminations, of critiques, of hidden thoughts compiled neatly on a Google Doc, she revealed that she had had a crush on me for a while. Shocked and flattered as I was, I didn’t think too much of it.

But looking back, I can’t help but think: 

How brave. How poetic. And how admirable.

“I think I need to send this to you for my sake.”

If only I had the guts to do something as vulnerable as that. 

And now, as I look back at three years of Choate, nothing comes to me except regret, regret about not being brave enough to do the things I thought I would, regret forcefully washing up on the shores of my subconscious. 

Regret I’d left the last common room ramen night early to waste time on YouTube. Regret I never committed to going to Sirinan’s and Smoothie King with the people I had to catch up with. Regret I squandered the tacky SAC dances and the cross country course and the hours I had in the studio that seemed so boring when I had them.

Regret that I hadn’t paid more attention in those tired classes, counting down the minutes until I’d get to walk out the door. Regret of counting down the days until the next break — clearly foolish, given the way things turned out.

Regret about not giving that Pratt-Packard speech in front of the entire school. It’s been on my bucket list ever since I saw Hannah Huddleston deliver hers in my sophomore year. I don’t know what I would have spoken about — anyone who knows me knows how cluttered my thoughts are — but, hell, I would have made it work anyway. Instead, I put it off, telling myself I’d get to it some other time, telling myself that other things — taking a nap, doing a load of laundry, playing a round of League of Legends — were more worth my time. 

Regret about how I did the whole college thing. Of course, I’m into Columbia, so I’m not really in the position to say much. But still: I do harbor a sense of regret for how much of my life I dedicated to stacking my résumé and how little, in turn, I devoted to pursuits of personal development. And I also regret — though again, I’m not in the position to say much, I know — not even giving myself a shot at Yale. Not to mention how that decision affected my family through the tumultuous, existentially draining thing. I could have gone about all of it any number of ways, yet that path, of all the million paths, was the one I chose.

And maybe most of all, I regret not being brave enough to tell the people I liked that I liked them. High school, I now see, is a playground for all sorts of failure and humiliation, but I didn’t even let myself try

So what if I thought I really had fallen for T when he came up to hug me after Blue Stockings, even if I knew nothing about who he actually was? That I saw more into that eye contact which he shot me, time and time again after that night, though he probably didn’t feel the same? That I secretly looked forward to any time I’d run into him in Lanphy, and that, after he — of all people — bumped into me and Naomi the afternoon after he graduated, I ran away from that table outside Starbucks to cry my eyes out? 

And so what if my heart raced and my throat dried up every time I locked eyes with S on the path? That I thought for hours on end like the silliest boy in the world about the look he shot me on the Hill House steps —  that three second look that seemed to last for years? That I took pleasure in knowing he was looking at me while I pretended to not have noticed him?

If only I had the guts to tell the person I had a crush on in my junior year that I had feelings for him, if not to spark a conversation then at least to hear an official rejection! In any case, my mind would have come to rest. Despite how misguided, or stupid, or unreasonable my crush may have been, at least I’d have walked out of the entire situation having grown and having gotten the bragging rights to say to myself: at least, Derek, you were brave enough to do that.

All those moments, all those dizzying times the world felt right and finally seemed, after so many moments of unluckiness, to make sense — all of them count for nothing now. 

I had convinced myself there’d be some point, far off, in the intangible, everlasting thing that was the Future to do all these things. All the tomorrows and the days after seemed so far away, and all the todays seemed so expendable. And now, without any warning — as if I had turned a corner and that was it, the end — there no longer is a future for me at Choate.

Deep down, all I ever really wanted in high school was to live like the characters I read about; I craved their honest lives, lives that seemed so distant to my own and yet so possible. Above all, ever since I read that book, I wanted to live like Ari. I wanted to be the kind of boy who shamelessly indulges in self-questioning, the kind of boy to cry openly, to know how to stumble. To tell the people he loved that he loved them. I wanted a boyfriend whom I’d drive to the desert with in the black of night, only to run around naked on the plains in the rain; I wanted the people around me to embrace me for who I was, make mistakes as I may; and above all, I wanted a happy, uncomplicated ending in which I acted on all my whims and lived out all my silly fantasies.

I look at where I was then and where I am now, and while I can’t pinpoint an exact moment when everything went wrong, when everything went spiralling off a divergent course I never intended to take, I know so clearly that the life I am living today is not the one I had hoped to live when I came to Choate. I look at all the superficial things that fence me into my own existence, and I realize I never really wanted convention, or success, or clarity — rather, I wanted to go out and do all the dumb little things I wanted to do, all the things people did in books, even if it meant I’d walk out of the whole lot none the wiser.

And now, I’m scared it’s too late to do any of these things. Coming out of Choate, what do I have now — what do I really have — except regret? 

These days, when I go to sleep, a little part of my heart clings on to the desperate hope that the next time I open my eyes I’ll be staring at the mellow, white plaster of my dorm room ceiling. I’ll groggily tug on the elastic blinds, sending them flying upward, and I’ll see a pastel blue sky dotted with clouds over Mem house. I’ll stagger to the bathroom in a stupor, brush my teeth, shower, dress. With time, I might even make it to Lanphy for a large tea with two shots of vanilla and a Chobani flip. Sophomore year, again.

Of course, when I climb back into the light from my dreams, I am hit again by the overwhelming, saddening force of reality, forced to live and make peace with all this regret — this torrential, paralyzing, unyielding regret — for another day.