Fragments of Cassandra

I spent years
asking the wrong question.

Not,

“What kind of life
would make my soul
come alive?”

But,

“Which choice
guarantees
I will not regret it?”

As though
certainty

were something
I needed, 
in order to make decisions.

So I stood
at the edge
of countless lives,

watching them
drift away,
because I could not prove
they were mine.

I have mourned
the mistakes
I have made.

But I have mourned
the unlived versions
of myself
far more.

The conversations
I never had.

The cities
I never walked.

The love
I never risked.

The dreams
I buried alive
simply because
they arrived
without a promise.

Then I looked
toward the wisdom
that had outlived
empires.

A Muslim
showed me;

that discipline
is walking forward

without demanding
the road
explain itself.

A Jew
showed me;

that life
is not something
you discover;

it is something
you choose,

again,
and again,
and again.

A Buddhist
showed me;

that the heaviest burden
I carried
was not my past,

but my refusal
to loosen
my grip
upon it.

And somewhere
between discipline,
choosing,
and letting go,

I realized
I had mistaken
the search;

for the correct life.

for the work
of living one.

Perhaps happiness
has never belonged

to those
who always chose
correctly.

Perhaps it belongs
to those
who choose
with their instinct,

allowing each decision;

beautiful,
painful,
or mistaken-

to introduce them
to someone
they could not have become
any other way.

The greatest tragedy
is not always
the road that ends
in regret.

Sometimes

it is the road
we were too frightened
to walk at all.

For a closed door
cannot disappoint you.

But it can quietly
become
the life
you never lived.



Be’ahava,
The Mourning Bird