If-Only’s, What If’s, & Now
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If-Only’s, What-if’s, and Now
By Jane Tawel
May 24, 2023
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The “If-only’s” stuck inside
create a life-time of regret.
We become unaware
that we have created our own unhealthiness —
Re-gretting. Re-griefing.
Re-gurgitating.
And we bring it all back up,
again, and again,
like bile, like vomit,
like hiccups that never end.
We drink the dregs left from the past,
and our insides ache,
but we keep sucking it all down,
and spewing it all out again.
Like carbonated bubbles,
we keep burping back up past wrongs.
Heart-burn as choice.
We come close to letting go,
but step away,
as if the perfume of freedom,
freedom from the past,
is too heady a scent,
too strong to wear now.
We re-fuse to re-alize
that all of us must leave
the past at the altar.
Kick it to the curb.
Close the door.
Re-lease ourselves,
from the past,
once and for all.
If-only we could leave the past at the altar,
the altar where we forgive ourselves all,
in the same way we forgive others, all,
we would never look back.
We never would look back.
We can never re-turn,
but we can, with re-joicing, re-pent.
Repent! which is just another word
for turning around and turning a new leaf,
and turning out our pockets,
where we hoard past judgments.
