The Roads I Didn’t Take

The Roads I Didn’t Take;

Sometimes, when the house is quiet and the evening folds in like an old book, I find myself wandering down invisible roads. Not the streets I walk each day or the familiar paths of routine, but the ones I didn’t take — the decisions I brushed aside, the flights I never boarded, the words I left unsaid.

It’s a peculiar kind of nostalgia, longing for lives I never lived.

When I was twenty-one, fresh out of university with a degree I chose more out of fear than passion, I received a job offer in a city I’d never been to. It was one of those places you picture in glossy travel magazines — tall glass towers, bustling coffee shops on every corner, a river slicing through the skyline. I remember standing in my tiny kitchen, reading the email on my old laptop. My heart thumped against my ribs like a wild bird, and for a moment, I could almost see myself there: renting a sunlit apartment, making new friends, becoming someone bold and unrecognizable.

I didn’t go.

I told myself I couldn’t afford it. That it was too soon, too far. I stayed. Took a safer job in a town I knew like the lines on my palm. And though my life moved forward, something stayed behind — a shadow-self waiting in that city I’d never visit.

Then there was her.

It’s strange how some people exist in your memory like half-written songs. You remember the chorus but forget the verses. She was my favorite almost. A friend first, then something more — though neither of us was brave enough to say it. I can still recall how the air felt electric when she laughed at something only I would notice. How my hand brushed hers once in the dark of a movie theater, and I let it linger half a second too long.

I told myself it wasn’t the right time. I was leaving for a new job; she was tangled in an on-again, off-again relationship with someone else. “Maybe someday,” I thought.

Someday never came.

She married someone kind. Moved to a city by the sea. I see pictures of her children now, smiling strangers with her eyes. And though my heart no longer aches for her, I wonder sometimes about the version of me that might have existed in a world where I had asked her to stay.

There were other roads too.

A graduate program I declined because I doubted I was good enough. A spontaneous trip a friend begged me to take, but I said no because of a deadline. A letter I never sent to my father, telling him all the ways I wished he’d been different, and how despite it all, I loved him anyway.

It’s tempting to mourn those missed chances — to convince myself they were failures. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize those untaken roads shaped me as much as the ones I chose. They carved quiet lessons into my skin. Taught me about fear, about the weight of regret, about the unglamorous beauty of resilience.

I am not the person I thought I’d be. I don’t live in a high-rise apartment overlooking a river. I didn’t marry my almost. I never became a celebrated writer in some bohemian city. But I’ve built a life here, among the choices I made, and it is soft in places, scarred in others, but wholly mine.

And those roads I didn’t take?

I like to think they exist in some parallel version of my story, and maybe, just maybe, that other me sometimes wonders what it would have been like to be here — in this small, quiet life I’ve made, with its humble joys and unexpected grace.

We are the sum of our choices, yes, but also of our refusals. Of the things we walked away from. The words we swallowed. The invitations we declined. And I carry them all with me, like ghosts, like old friends.

Not to haunt me, but to remind me.

That every step forward is made not just of decisions, but of doors left closed. And sometimes, the beauty is not in what we became, but in everything we might have been.