Regrets

This is not a community post. This is personal.

If you have a chance to go and say goodbye to someone: go. Just go. If you believe the invitation to visit is sincere, then go.

I didn't.

I didn't want to interfere, I didn't want to intrude. I didn't want to impose some need of my own for closure into someone else's pain and suffering,

I thought I was doing the right thing. The selfless thing. The noble thing, even.

But maybe I was just afraid.

How do you say goodbye to someone for whom you have felt both love and fear, and anger, despair, yet still kinship: a distant kind of familial obligation? How do you reach across years and years of separation? All that you know is that the reasons why everything happened the way it did are blurred and ambiguous. You feel no wisdom. You feel you have nothing new to offer.

It was another lifetime. We were different people. That's what people say, right?

I was so sure I was doing the right thing. Now I'm grieving for the chance I didn't take.