A Choice

I waited too long. It’s the waiting that made the difference too. Had I said something, done something, acted like something more than an idiot, maybe, maybe something could have changed. I waited. I waited for the opportune moment, for the appropriate time. There never was one. It was never right, never okay. It makes me think, though. If we spend all of our lives waiting for the right time, will it ever come?

I made a choice today. Whether consciously or not, I made a choice. Maybe it was best, I’ll never know, because I never took the step. So many times before, I have been the one to take a step, to put myself out there, and to make myself vulnerable. Maybe I was hoping that this time, this time maybe someone would do that for me. But as someone once said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” And I’ll never know if it would have been different if I had.

We watched a movie tonight: The Time Machine. The main character in the movie asks the question, “Why can’t we change the past?” The answer is something along the lines of: we cannot change the past because the future, or the present, is a direct result of what happened in the past, and therefore, it cannot be changed. So the fact that I am sitting here now regretting the choice that I made is a direct result, consequently, of the choice that I made. The only way I could change it is to use what time I have now to choose to say what I kept within my head before.

Unfortunately though, I have waited too long and have run out of time to express what I wished to say. I could say something now, but the use of it would be next to the usefulness of a ‘screen door on a submarine’. I waited. I waited for the right moment, the right time. In my wait though, time never changed for me. Things were never right just because I wanted them to be. I did nothing to change the future, and now I sit here, looking at the past, with only “what if…” to haunt me.