Living Beyond Survival: Reflection on Regret, Dreams/Reaching for More

And I know,

I will not die from regret.

Not exactly.

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Regret is not a knife,

It is a fog,

Thick and clinging,

Settling into the folds of my skin,

Into the spaces between my ribs.

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I will live through it.

That’s the curse.

I will live through it all.

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I will remember

The dreams I let rot on the vine,

The places I never touched,

The songs I never sang,

The oceans I never stood before,

With my own bare feet,

My own bare heart.

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I will not be able to say

I lived my life.

Only that I survived it.

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And somewhere,

In the quiet,

When no one is looking,

I will mourn

Not for what I lost…

But for what I never even reached for.

“I may not die of regret,
but I will carry the memory of the life I never lived.”

— G.M.

A Life Made of Fragments

There are things I wish someone had told me sooner.
Regret doesn’t arrive all at once, like some cinematic tragedy.
It seeps in quietly. It lingers.
It is not the sharpness of a single wound.
It is the slow weight of every road not taken.
Every truth unspoken,
every yes you swallowed because fear felt safer.

This poem came out of a moment when I realized:
survival alone is not the same as living.
You can move through years like a ghost, leaving your own dreams behind to wither in the dark.
And one day, without warning, you look back and feel not just the losses, but the absences.
The things you never even reached for because you convinced yourself you couldn’t,
or shouldn’t, or it wasn’t the right time.

I wrote this piece as a reminder:
I don’t want to survive my life.
Neither should you.
Do not spend your years merely surviving.
Do not wait to mourn a life you never even touched.
Do not settle for “good enough.”
Want more.
Live so fully that regret has nothing left to hold onto.

All the Small Things That Last

If you keep waiting, time may simply pass you by,
and it will never feel like the right time.

But you are already here.
You might as well thrive in being alive.

Do whatever your heart aches to do,
love, lose, fail, try again.

In the end, what truly counts isn’t only the successes;

It’s the small, unremarkable moments
that shine when you look back.
The smell of rain on warm pavement,
the laughter that leaves you breathless.
The quiet nights you stayed up just to talk to a friend
or to watch the sky turn pink.
The touch of a hand that steadied you.
All of it… every shard and every shimmer,
it’s every small piece that comes together
to make up a life.

Dying isn’t a tragedy when you know you have lived.
It is simply the ending of a beautiful epic story
that could never have been
if you weren’t here.

And I hope, when your story is done,
you can look back and truly say:
“I lived. A life that was one of a kind.”

If these words find you, I hope they unsettle you in the best way.
I hope they make you ask:
What have I been surviving instead of living?
And I hope, quietly, fiercely… you begin to reach.