I spend so much time thinking about regret. Imagining the outcome of different paths, trying to figure out where they would lead. So much mental capacity deciphering my own thought spiral and its accompanying conviction that there is a perfect, placid life, my own alternate existence, pristine and simple, existing in a neighboring reality in which certain turns in the road were never set upon. But it isn't true, is it? Any of it. I knew that. I had learned it. But it is an irresistible fantasy, if only because it implies I have some control over my own fate.
