I was trying to remember if I ever made the actual promise to stay here. I'm not sure that I ever did. I know that I thought about it, and I might have even implied it, but I don't think that I ever really came right out and said it. Promised it.

This is all just speculation, of course. Things are almost never as bad as they seem to be. Perhaps, this too, shall pass. Perhaps I'll have a good laugh about it, someday. About how I worried about what I would do, if I were pressed into action.

The thought of starting over is quite intriguing to me. I'd be lying if I said otherwise. I mean, there's only one thing that would give me pause. And sometimes even that doesn't seem like much of a thing. A sense of potential isn't really a thing at all, I don't think, when I think about it objectively. I mean, it's nice to have something to wish for, but when wishing becomes the end all and be all of an entire life - it loses a bit of its luster.

Sometimes it seems like I'm stuck in the worst possible place. A hundred miles to the East, and things would be better. A hundred miles to the North, and I'd at least have a fighting chance. More than that - five hundred miles, a thousand miles, two thousand miles - things just keep looking better and better the further from here that I look.

All choices were taken from me a long time ago. This might just be a new choice. A new opportunity. It would be weird, and more than a little exciting, to have a choice again. But I really don't know if I could make that choice, or if there would really be any choice at all.

Would it really be possible to start over while leaving so many things unfinished?

I wonder which would be worse, a lifetime of regret, or a lifetime of unanswered prayers.