Regret

Regret started by changing my favorite color from periwinkle pink to blasphemy blue,

To impress a gaggle of boys with perpetually runny noses in the fourth grade
Trying to convince THEM that girls didn’t have cooties by lying to myself
But wh ispering lies leads to shouting the truth
And regret sounds like
I do like blue, I do like blue, I do like blue,
But I just don’t like you.

After the awkward, sweaty middle school dance in the 7^th grade,
Regret continued
When a boy whose last name was Spain
Was asked by friends to rate me
and he gave me an 8 out of 10
on a spectrum he made up
a B+ that was somehow determined my worth
Cool, but not cool enough
Regret looked liked marks on my lips
Stamps of teeth that zipped my mouth shut
before I told him what I’d rate him
Holding in verbal diarrhea, that would surely get me a C-

In the 10^th grade, my friends and I were divided in two groups
By boys who were convinced there were two types of girls
Girls like me
And girls like her
Girls who could analyze Shakespeare like it was second nature
But couldn’t walk a meter in two inch heels
And girls who could
Girls with perfect eyebrows and all the right curves in all the right places
Girls who were just friends
And girls who were always someone’s girlfriend
Regret was living in the prison they created
Instead of setting the whole thing on fire
Because they couldn’t understand that we were sisters
And you can’t just tear a family apart.

Regret was the silence

That followed an argument with my brother, 10 years young,
I, a puddle of tears
And he, brimming but unyielding, “Boys don’t cry.”
But regret was not the hug I gave him,
a hard squeeze that attempted to tell him what I couldn’t.

Boys may not cry, but humans do.  
And somewhere between kindergarten and the first football game, we’ve forgotten boys are human too.

And when my friend teased me the other day
“ohhh, she wants the D”
Regret was not my answer
“Yeah, I want the D.
the Destruction of the Patriarchy.”