Regret

I've had writer's block for the past couple of months, and it's high time I unblock. Since consuming vast quantities of Curious George fruit snacks doesn't seem to be helping any, nor does turning the hall towel closet into a kitty day spa (complete with a rest and relaxation box!), I thought I might try writing something.

I'm teaching at the college again come fall. This guaranteed money nugget has given me permission to work a handful of temporary, a-typical summer jobs, the most recent of which involved reading essays on regret written by 9th graders.

In my coffee stained, rain soaked American Heritage Dictionary, regret is sandwiched between regressive and regular. Which is precisely what being a 9th grader feels like. Reverting to baby behavior on the brink of adulthood. Looking in the mirror and facing the unshakeable imprint of ordinary. My memory of 1991-92 is a montage of me in various androgynous flannel shirts, moping in the school art room to an accompanying soundtrack of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Cats. Occasionally, I flashback to settling in (pajamas and pizza bagels) for a Saturday night marathon of Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman.

The world regret derives from Old French regreter, to lament, and possibly grata, Old Norse for moan. I imagine a lot of grata-ing among Norse women. Would you want to stay betrothed to your dead husband by joining him on his funeral pyre? Modern regret can be "a sense of longing for someone gone," or "distress over a desire unfulfilled or an action performed or not performed." Despite the tedium of holding regret up to the light of a grading rubric, I more often than not found myself either shocked, amused, or moved by what many high school freshman express grief and disappointment over.

Sure, there's the slew of expected regrets: stealing Pokemon cards, spilling nail polish on your parents upstairs carpet, teepeeing the neighbor's house, putting over 40 Cheese-Its in your mouth at once, ignoring your dying grandmother, accidentally knocking your little brother through dry wall. But for every innocent "I peed the bed" there is its nefarious twin: "I burned wet frogs" or "I ran over a little girl and regret not reporting it."

Regret is perhaps more intense, more aptly labeled, when the regretee has had significant distance from the... sorrified experience. Sorrified sounds so much like scorified: what happens to gold and silver when it separates from ore. As a 32 year old, I now have a better grasp on what is truly worthy of regret and what is not of any lamentable value. My precious metal laments have separated from yore. Given the same prompt as these students, I no longer choose to write about how sorry I am that I lied to my third grade class about my father being a leprechaun.

Or I could be wrong: maybe young regret breeds keener sorrow. "I remember smelling my own blood and looking out the broken window," one boy wrote. "But now I've slayed the dumb years."

Even in 9th grade, there is seemingly existential regret ("my rock would call out to me in my sleep and make me do horrible things"), addictive regret (At 9, I was gambling on a regular basis), and sexual regret ("his small masculine hands began to move slowly over my body"). There is regret over a vague game called "Little Girl and Puppy"(hint: the puppy was played by another little girl). Regret so seductive it makes you "feel like a wolf high on angel dust." Regret so hyperbole your stomach drops "like the bomb on Hiroshima." And, because these kids are still in the process of figuring out what it even means to regret, regret over a lesson half-learned ("that's why I haven't killed an animal larger than my fist since then").

I regret often. So often, in fact, that my regret has evolved into a kind of re-regret, a longing to undo the time wasted on regret in the first place. Maybe burning wet frogs is a metaphor for not creating. Maybe the rock calling out to me in my sleep is making me do nothing. All I know is, I've made a promise to myself to write every day this month, to see what newness happens, to make my grata non grata.