Simple Things
On the regret that arrives only after the simple things are gone — and the chance, if we get it, to do them differently.
The simple things are easy to miss because they don’t ask for anything. They don’t insist. They just sit there, available, until they aren’t.
This is a poem about that — and about what we tell ourselves we’d do if we got another shot at them.
We take for granted
The simple things
We make life difficult
Instead of embracing what it brings
But when things suddenly change
And our lives turn upside down
We can’t help but feel regret
For what once was, it all compounds
Why didn’t I go here, why didn’t I go there?
Why didn’t I just love what I already had?
That’s the part that drives me mad!
We just need one more chance
For things to be normal again
I hope if we get there, we won’t fade
Instead we’ll do what we wanted
The things that we always delayed
Why didn’t I just love what I already had? That’s the line I can’t shake. It’s the question you can only ask in the past tense, because in the present tense it doesn’t occur to you yet.
The promise at the end — that next time we won’t fade, we’ll do the delayed things — is partly a wish and partly a warning to the future self who reads it back. The simple things are still simple. They’re still there. Most of them are not waiting forever.
— JTC