Regret

It is that dusky time of night. The sun, red and bloated from a long day's work, is slipping lazily below the horizon. Clouds of chittering birds flap hither and yon, guided by that strange magic of nature invisible to people. Closer to the ground, there is a homestead, its porch angled to catch the slanting orange rays of the setting sun, casting long shadows at right angles behind it. It sits resplendent, if a little stark, among the winter-shorn fields of grass around it. The fields are stained autumnal by the last of the sunlight leaking from the horizon. A faint breeze whispers past taking the day’s warmth with it, with the assurance that it will soon be dark and cold. There is a figure on the porch. A man, with a face that belies the number of sunsets he has seen, is sitting in an old wicker chair on the porch. He gazes out onto the tableau with the air of a man in a deep reverie, although truth be told he is not thinking much. He finds it more like this than he used to, although he is not entirely displeased. He feels that he has done enough thinking in his life to allow for indulgences like these moments. A faint crackle emanates from the cigarette he is holding, prompting him to bring it up to his mouth to inhale, the glowing butt aping the colours of the setting sun. He hears the screen door creak behind him, but does not turn. Onto the porch steps a small boy, one who could scarcely have much of a claim to deep thinking but is approaching an age where adults and their actions no longer seem huge and incomprehensible. The boy is out on the porch hoping to escape the notice of his mother for a little longer, before she chastises him in to washing up before dinner, a practice he does not see the need for (privately, she does not either but old habits are hard to break). In any case, he is not there to watch the sunset but it makes a nice backdrop all the same. He glances at his grandfather for a moment, then sits on the steps of the porch a few feet away from the chair, with his chin resting in his hands, and is quiet.
After a time, the man breaks the silence.
‘Enjoying the sunset, kiddo?’ The boy considers this for a moment.
‘Yeah. It’s pretty. All the colours.’
‘It’s real nice this time of year isn’t it?’ He pauses to inhale deeply from a new cigarette that somehow found its way into his hand without realising he finished had the old one.
‘Do you watch it every day?’ the boy asks.
‘Most days, if the weather’s good, and I remember in time. Sun doesn’t stay out long this time of year.’
‘Doesn’t it get boring, watching the same thing every day?’ the boy says, in a tone that indicates he could think of a dozen more exciting things he’d rather be doing, and that Grampa is pretty boring for wanting to do this. The man smiles.
‘Gotta make time in your life for the small things, son. Otherwise one day they’ll be gone and you’ll regret it. You’ll understand when you’re older.’
The boy thought about this for a moment. He didn’t quite understand why you’d want to waste time on the small things, whatever those were, when there were bigger and presumably better things you could be doing. He cocks his head and looks at his grandfather curiously.
‘Grandpa, what does it mean to regret?’
‘Oh, that’s a tough one kid…you sure you don’t want to ask your mother?’ He winks at the boy and muses over it.
‘She’s busy cooking dinner. I want you to tell me.’
‘Alright then son, alright. Hmm. Regret.’ He falls silent for a while, thinking, and the boy is about to repeat the question, thinking grampa has forgotten, when he speaks again.
‘Regret is feeling bad for something that you did, or maybe didn’t do. It’s…I guess it’s feeling like you made the wrong choice. Especially when it hurts someone else.’ He shakes his head at the incomplete vagueness of his answer.
‘I don’t get it. Why would you decide to do something that’s wrong, if it’s gonna hurt someone? Can’t you just not do it?’ The boy speaks with the surety of a child who is not yet grown up enough to know that the world is anything but just.
‘Doesn’t quite work that way when you’re a grown-up.’ The boy grimaces at this and the old man laughs. ‘Okay, okay, I can see you’re tired of that line. Nobody goes about trying to do the wrong thing – well, no sensible person anyway. If you’re a good person, you don’t want to hurt other people. Life ain’t so black and white though, once you get out there into the big wide world. Things don’t get given to you in boxes marked ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ – it’s up to you to try and decide what you feel is right or wrong. Trouble is, everyone’s got different ideas about what’s right and what’s wrong. See, I bet you think eating ice cream for dinner every night would feel pretty right, eh?’ The boy nods vigorously and the old man chuckles. ‘Pretty sure your mama would say it’s wrong, and she got good reasons too. Wanting something doesn’t automatically make it right. Do you see what I’m saying?’
The boy wants to say no, that he should be able to have ice cream for dinner if he wants, but he feels this is one of those rare moments where he’s not being treated like a kid, so he tries to respond in kind, by slowly nodding his head. The man appraises him for a moment, then continues.
‘Regret is when you do something you thought was right, but then later on you realise it was wrong. It’s the feeling you get when you wish you could go back in time, change whatever it is that you did to not make the choice you made.’
‘How does something right turn into something wrong?’
‘It’s the way of the world kid. If we all just lived in caves by ourselves you’d never need to regret hurting someone else – but you might regret always being alone. It’s the trade-off we make to be around other people – you gotta live with the fact that some day, you’re gonna hurt someone doing what you think is right for you. You might see it coming, you might not, but it’ll happen. And there’s no mistaking that feeling when you think I wish I could go back in time and change that. But you can’t. And that’s regret.’
‘That sounds bad.’
‘It surely is kid, it surely is. Happens to all of us, to some degree.’ At this the boy shakes his head defiantly, and the old man is surprised.
‘Not me. I’m never gonna regret anything. I’ll always do the right thing by everyone.’ And he looks so fiercely passionate in this belief that it’s hard not to believe he won’t remember this moment when he is a grown man, out in the same world that grows older and meaner by degrees, as our histories grow and our memories shrink, as the circle of life is revealed to be people continuously repeating the same mistakes, creating them while trying to avoid them. As we realise that at the end of our lives, regret is all we have left undone, all that we could have been and all that we never will.
‘All you can do is try, kid. All you can do is try’.