by Charlene Iannella

Created on: February 05, 2011

As a human being, my life sometimes seems so riddled with mistakes that I can barely walk without tripping over one.  I’m not sure what it is that makes mistakes so inevitable in life but I’m positive that none of us are immune to them or the way they seem to infiltrate our minds and hearts, making us question so many things in the future and be unable to forget so many things in the past.  Mistakes are so haunting because we can’t ever seem to blame anyone but ourselves for them.  And no matter how beautiful a place we end up, some moments pull at us like a riptide that won’t let go.

Mistakes can take many forms.  The ones that truly were mistakes and no question would have been the wrong way to have gone in our lives.  And then there are the mistakes that seemed like they would have been mistakes at the time, but something inside never really lets those decisions go.  The mind wanders back to those forks in the road, almost completely on its own, and finds itself winding down the other path and seeing an entirely different way.  The path where the question was answered yes instead of no; and the person who’s currently alone is not anymore, in this parallel universe where suddenly, your mind has changed the course of events. 

And as your incredibly creative and inventive mind flies through the possibilities, the holidays that were almost shared, the children you could have had, the cups of tea you nearly shared and books that you almost read and discussed, your own children pull you back to the present, to this life that you are living.  This life I lead that my mistake still gets to be in, yet a part that try as I might, I can never make better.  While I see the decisions that led me away from him as a mistake, I believe he sees ones that would lead us together as the real mistakes. There is nothing so exquisitely painful and ironic all at once than being brutally honest with yourself about such a brutal truth.

And here we have the most definitive part of what a mistake is.  When two people who loved each other believed the exact opposite things and they never stop.  All the beautiful gestures or awful slights in the world will never even the odds between them because they will never be on equal footing.  Somewhere along the line, the real misstep, the real mistake happened quietly, silently, and it led them this way that never could be stopped.  A real mistake is losing someone so inherently valuable to you as a person, just because they cannot be exactly what it is that you want them to be.  And once that mistake is made, it's sometimes impossible to be undone.

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