I don't have a name. People only remember me when the damage is done.I've never been alone, not really. I am the voice that follows him—the thoughts he can't escape, the guilt that gnaws when sleep won't come. I'm the whisper in his head at 2:13 a.m, the force that clings to his thought. The tightening in his chest when he see someone living the life he once wanted.
The breath he hold when no one listens.
I Am REGRET.
And this is where I first met him.....
I first slipped into his thoughts ten years ago, when he was just sixteen—wide‑eyed, praying over a trembling rosary, desperate for more time not because he wasn't prepared, but because he wanted to be perfect. He was too young to understand how heavy a life could get, yet already old enough to carry silence like a curse.
While other boys were dreaming of jerseys and stolen kisses, he was bargaining with heaven—
Asking for the entrance exam to be postponed, not because he wasn't prepared, but because he needed to be perfect.
He gave his blood, sweat, and tears to it.
He barely slept.
Studied till his vision blurred.
Forgot what laughter sounded like.
He starved his body and cracked his mind, hoping a perfect grade would save him—make the sacrifice worth it.
That was the first time he died.
He didn't know it then, but that's when the boy who once sketched superheroes at the back of his notebooks was buried.
A boy who dreamed in colors, who loved to draw entire worlds before the bell rang.
His parents—God bless them—called it ambition.
They saw in him the surgeon they never became, the honor they never earned.
They never asked what he wanted.
Only reminded him what they needed.
And so he obeyed.
So he killed that boy, the boy he wanted to be quietly. Without ceremony.
And that's when I came in.
I didn't haunt him at first. I just sat beside him at night, while he stared at the ceiling, wondering if perfect grades would ever feel like peace.
I whispered softly,
"You're not chasing a dream.
You're running from disappointment.
But how far can you run when it's yourself you're leaving behind?"
He couldn't hear me then.
But one day, he will.
When he's twenty-six, Lying in a hospital bed, Head shaved, Hope thinned, And time no longer a friend.
That's when he'll look at the medals, the certificates, the white coat folded like a burial cloth...
And ask the question no doctor can answer:
"Was it worth it?"
Until then, I wait.
In the margins of his notebooks.
In the ache behind his eyes.
In the tightening of his chest when he is suffering from anxiety attack.
In the gap between who he is—and who they told him to be.
He's sixteen,
His physics textbook open.
Brain locked shut.
The formulas on the page don't talk to him. But his pencil does.
He flips to the back of his book.
Sketches something—someone.
A stage.
Crowd cheering.
A boy, him, holding a golden plaque in one hand and standing beside a machine that could breathe life into broken engines.
Under it, he writes:
"Best Young Innovator—World Tech Expo 2030."
He doesn't say these things aloud.
He draws them, because in real life, nobody listens.
In the world his parents chose, machines don't matter.
Dreams don't feed families.
Engineering is a "waste of time."
He erases the stage.
Erases the smile on the sketched version of himself.
But he can't erase the ache.
That night, he eats late.
Not food, Pages.
He forces Physics into his skull with red eyes and trembling fingers.
He tells himself, "Maybe if I score high enough, I'll feel something."
That was the first time he starved his body to feed a dream that wasn't his, and that was when I moved in.
Into his silence.
Into the spaces he stopped drawing.
Into the parts of him he gave away, bit by bit, to survive approval.
He'll chase grades now.
Beg God to postpone his exam.
Sleep with a rosary under his pillow like it's a key to escape.
But he doesn't realize… he's already locked in.
One day, when he's twenty-six, lying on a hospital bed with a tumor eating away the time he thought he had—
He'll ask:
"What did I do all this for?"
And that's when I'll speak.
That's when I'll stop whispering.
That's when I'll tell him:
"You were a genius… but not in the way they wanted you to be.
They made you bury a future where your hands built miracles—
Just to wear a coat that never fit."
Truly, Freedom is a crime when you are born with expectations...
I am Regret, in him I dwells now.