If Only

"If Only"

If only I had spoken that day,

If only I had reached for your hand,

If only I had stayed a little longer,

Would time have bent in my favor?

Memories whisper in quiet nights,

Ghosts of words I never dared to say.

They slip through my fingers like grains of sand,

Dissolving before they can touch the shore.

"If only," I tell myself,

A prayer wrapped in regret,

A song with no melody,

A letter never sent.

But what is regret,

If not the weight of untold stories?

If not the echo of roads never taken?

If not the silence that lingers where love should have been?

I have learned that time does not wait,

That hesitation is a thief,

That the greatest sorrow is not losing—

But never daring to hold at all.

So I vow, not another “if only.”

Not another love unspoken.

Not another dream abandoned.

Because the heaviest echoes

Are the words we never speak.