After all is said and done...
You know the feeling, the slight tingling in your bones, your thoughts frozen, of an ache to press the undo button, to rewind the reel of experience, as if it's a cassette you saved to revisit, and snip off wrong turns, wrong interpretations, and wrong investment of your devotion.
Rivers never return to their old courses. Trees do not reclaim the leaves they have shed. Words, once spoken, can never be taken back.
Yet they always find the sea. Yet each spring they will bloom again. Yet the silence that follows holds expiation.