Oliver sat on his worn leather chair, facing a coffee table that held nothing but an ashtray and a pile of overdue bills. He had no children filling the walls with their pictures, no awards glittering on the shelves, not even any scars from reckless adventures to tell stories about.
"Failure hurts," Oliver thought, watching the smoke from his cigarette vanish. "But nothingness... nothingness is a black hole that swallows your soul in silence. At least a failure has a story about how he lost the war. As for me, I never even entered the barracks."
Later that day, Oliver had to go out to buy a few essentials. At the corner of the street, he ran into Albert, an old schoolmate. Albert looked tired, his face marked by the wear of the years, but his eyes still glimmered with stories of his travels in Africa, of the company that had gone bankrupt twice before finally succeeding, and of his grandchildren who refused to fall asleep without hearing his stories.
"What about you, Oliver?" Albert asked with innocent curiosity. "Where has life taken you?"
Oliver swallowed a bitter lump in his throat. "Me? I... I was planning several projects. I was waiting for the right moment, you know. The circumstances were never really ideal."
Albert shook his head with a pity he could not quite hide. "The perfect moment is a lie invented by the fearful, my friend. Life does not wait for those who arrange their seats before the show begins."
Oliver returned to his apartment and felt as if the walls had shrunk by a few centimeters. He realized that his enemy was neither poverty nor bad luck, but regret over all the times he had said, "Tomorrow."
Regret is the delayed tax a person pays for false safety. Oliver had been safe his whole life; he had not risked his money, had not broken his heart in impossible love, had not gambled his reputation on a mad idea. And now safety had rewarded him with absolute loneliness and a silence broken only by the hum of the refrigerator.
He opened the old notebook he had bought twenty years ago to write his "great novel." The pages were blank, pristine, and infuriating.
"This is my grave," he whispered to himself. "These blank pages are the final proof that I died while I was still breathing."
Regret is the silent lament for the version of ourselves we could have become... and never dared to be.
Oliver made himself a simple dinner, and while he chewed without appetite, he understood the horrible truth: when you leave no mark on the world, the world begins to erase you while you are still here.
He had no achievements to hide behind from the monster of time. He stood completely naked before the idea of "the end." And that night, he cried because he could not find a single reason to say that his life had been worth the trouble.
Regret was the only heir to all those wasted years, sharing his bed, waking him in the morning to remind him that today was just one more "nothing" added to the list.