The Versions That Haunt Me

I have too many regrets they bloom like tumors in the soft tissue of memory, each one pulsing with what I should have said before silence set in like rigor mortis. I swallowed whole versions of myself the reckless, the brave, the boy who ran before the door slammed shut. Now I speak in echoes of things I almost did. I wear lives that were never mine borrowed skin stitched with trembling hands. Time doesn’t pass. It repeats. A loop of almosts, a static scream beneath my breath. I reach for moments already burning. Beg the past to hold still while I cut it open and try to crawl inside. But every thread frays. Every version unravels. Every choice I didn’t make drags a knife through the one that did. And what’s left? This composite ghost. This broken archive. This aching palimpsest of a person who once believed he had time.