Haunted

The attempt was doomed from the outset, of course. He had never had more than the ghost of a chance. Still, that had been tantalizing enough that he had steeled up his courage to ask her anyway. When she turned him down, it was no surprise to anyone… least of all to him. He could see it coming the whole time he was speaking, had seen it coming even before he opened his mouth.

The whole long scene replayed itself in his head for the rest of the day, and for much of the week beyond that… the awful crushing inevitability of it all losing none of its grip on him to the power of either time or distance. It would continue to well up within him from time to time, throughout that week and the next month and all the long years after that. Even much later, when he was happily married and comfortably established in his career and in all other regards far removed from the boy he’d been in high school, it still came back to him at odd moments, threatening to overwhelm him with disappointment or frustration or embarrassment.

There are those who say that we always regret most the things that we do not do, the risks that we do not take. These are people who have never been haunted by the ghost of a chance.