It was a nothing thing. A minor sin, an indiscretion that, in the moment, seemed weightless, no more damning than a lie about traffic when arriving late for dinner. I told myself that. I told myself, too, that I was still the same man she married, the same man who laid beside her night after night, who knew the smell of her hair in every permutation—shampooed and damp, sun-warmed, slick with the oil of sleep. And yet, I did this thing.
And it was not weightless. It was not minor. It crushed the life we had built between its pitiless teeth. I should have known that was how it worked. She knew. She knew the moment I lied about where I had been, the moment I came home wearing a cologne I did not own, my shirt freshly tucked though I had not been home to change. She knew because she had always known me, truly known me, and what I had done—this obscene, absurd failure—was to make myself unknowable to her. I had thrown myself out of the house of her heart, slammed the door behind me, and was left standing in the wind of my own stupidity, begging to be let back in.
It is a cruelty how long regret lasts. It outlives the pleasure, the foolish thrill, outlives even the rage. It is the sediment left when everything else has washed away. And what I miss now is not just her, but the man I was before I ruined it, the man she loved without question, without fear. I see that man sometimes in old photographs, his hand light on her waist, his gaze pulled toward her in every candid shot. A man who had not yet learned that happiness is not something you get to take for granted, that love, real love, does not endure neglect or betrayal or being cast aside like an old coat on the back of a chair in another woman’s apartment.
Regret is not a sharp pain, not something that stabs and then subsides. It is dull, persistent, a low ache that sits behind my ribs, stretching out in the long, empty hours of the night when I can no longer distract myself. It does not let me sleep easily. It whispers to me in the silence, reminding me of everything I lost, of the warmth of her body beside me, of the quiet certainty that someone in this world saw me, knew me, and still chose me. Now, I am unchosen. Now, I wake alone to the ghost of her presence in a bed that feels too big, in a house that feels like a mausoleum to a life I shattered.
Regret punishes in the smallest ways, in the mornings when I reach for my phone to send her a message before I remember that she is gone. In the afternoons when I pass a café we once lingered in, our knees touching under the table, and realize that I will never again be granted that kind of easy intimacy. In the evenings, when I come home to an empty apartment, where even the air feels still, waiting for something that will never return.
I miss my wife. I miss the way she looked at me before she knew what I had done. I miss the ease between us, the shorthand, the peace. Now, I carry my regret in my pockets like stones, a weight I shift from hand to hand, an ache that no confession or apology will lighten. I see her sometimes—at the grocery store, across a crowded sidewalk. She does not look away. She does not look through me. She looks at me as a woman looks at a fire she has already escaped. And then she walks on, leaving me to smolder in the wreckage I made.
I used to believe that regret was something you could move past, something that softened with time. But it doesn’t. It lingers, it festers, it digs into the marrow of who you are and makes itself at home. It reminds you, every single day, that there was a moment when you had everything, and instead of holding it close, you let it slip through your fingers for something fleeting, something meaningless. And the worst part is, you have to live with yourself. That is the final punishment—waking up each day as the man who did this, who ruined something irreplaceable, who cannot go back and undo the wreckage of his own making.