The Department of Unchosen Things

There is a department somewhere
that keeps records of everything
you almost did.

The message you nearly sent.
The train you almost boarded.
The person you almost loved
enough to tell the truth.

Every hesitation has a file.
Every abandoned dream
has a number.

And somewhere, behind a desk
that has never known the sun,
an old clerk sits quietly
sorting through your almosts.

He knows the life
you would have lived
if you had been a little braver.

He knows the city
where you might have been happy,
the face you might have grown old beside,
the person you might have become
if one ordinary afternoon
had gone differently.

Sometimes, he opens a file
and watches you live another life.

In one, you stayed.
In another, you left.
In one, you said everything.
In another, you said nothing
and spent the next twenty years
wondering what would have happened.

The clerk never judges you.

He has seen enough human beings
to understand that most decisions
are made by people
who have no idea
which moments will become history.

But one evening,
I found my own file.

It was thinner than I expected.

Inside were the things
I had spent years mourning,
the opportunities I thought
had built a wall between me
and the person I wanted to be.

I asked the clerk
why there was so little inside.

He adjusted his glasses.

"Because most of what you regret,"
he said,
"was never a life you lost."

I stared at him.

"It was a life you imagined
after learning how the other one hurt."

Then he showed me something
I had never thought to ask about.

A second file.

It contained every moment
I had survived
because a certain door remained closed.

Every person I had never met
who might have broken my heart.

Every dream I had abandoned
that might have consumed the years
I now wish I had spent differently.

Every version of happiness
I had mistaken for a certainty
simply because I had never tested it.

I wanted to read further.

The clerk closed the file.

"That one is not yours to mourn,"
he said.

"Why not?"

"Because you cannot grieve
the truth about a life
you never lived."

For a long time,
I stood there
between two impossible futures,
trying to decide
which one had stolen more from me.

Then I noticed something.

The department had no windows.
No clocks.
No doors leading outside.

Only shelves
stretching into darkness,
filled with lives
that could no longer be lived.

I asked the clerk
if anyone ever left.

He smiled for the first time.

"Of course," he said.
"Every morning."

"Where do they go?"

He pointed toward me.

"Back to the life
they still have."

And suddenly,
I understood why the department
had been built.

Not to punish us
for the lives we never chose,

but to remind us
how easily we can spend
the life we did choose
standing in a room
full of ghosts.

I left without opening another file.

Somewhere behind me,
the old clerk returned to his desk.

I imagine he is still there,
quietly recording our almosts,
never knowing which ones
we will spend our lives regretting.

And perhaps that is the saddest thing
about being human.

We are given one life
to experience,

but an imagination
capable of making us mourn
a thousand others.

Tonight,
I will try to live
without asking
what might have been.

Not because my choices
were always right.

Not because the road I took
was the best one.

But because somewhere,
in a department I will never see,
there is a clerk
who has finished recording
all the lives I did not live.

And for the first time,
I have decided
to stop visiting them.