re·gret

/rəˈɡret/

noun

a feeling of sadness, repentance, or disappointment over something that has happened or been done.

Similar:

repentance spilling from her snake tongue, monsoon, my final frontier; the way she says she’d “take it back,” as if she could reach into my throat and retrieve the pieces of her promise. and how i let her weep and cling to me because a mother’s tears are acid. how my heart bruises with abandon each time she’s sorry        /       sorrow when my father would gather ghosts at our kitchen table, again, again, until i’d fever dreamed his madness. grief clumsy in his voice, “dysfunctional family,” china crying in the cupboard. when he became a guest in the house he nursed — like sleeping in a twin bed  /       contrition like rainbow sins like how i denied and lied for years like faithless creed, like i like women. how when i told my parents god wasn’t real they didn’t give a shit, but mom told me therapy was twenty first century folklore      /       remorse that i wasn’t myself two years ago, that i’d crush bullets between my fingertips, that i’d scream “fuck you” in stairwells so loud the phrase still ricochets in my stomach; in how i trace our mistakes every time we touch  /       guilt because i hate american fairy tales. there’s starlight, love and shit, and i’m a thankless bandit. how i hate little kids. the way i’m dying not to be like my mom. the way some people still love me when i’m a bitch, all philanthropy and pity kisses        /       shame to be alive when in the motel in athens my mother says she wants a divorce and my father’s bleeding bombshells on the carpet, wishes hemorrhaging /       (they never get one) /       compunction in the fragility of forgiveness, in the goneness of my past. in how i never steal pennies off the street, instead turn them on their heads so they can eyeball strangers        /       self-reproach in the way i am a poet, and mom writes short stories, in how i have twinned her like a fresh villain, fictive ghosts and crocodiles. in how she scrapped finance for this and now she’s alone and a cynic   /       mourning in me and you, in kidnapped nostalgia, in forgotten amber alerts, in the way blood cannot mean love. in fragments of me i wish i’d kept: gratitude, giving tree, feeling pretty when i wasn’t. in marriage; mom and dad don’t touch, but they’re better now. they’re better now, and i am so much worse.

Origin

late Middle English: from Old French regreter ‘bewail (the dead)’, perhaps from the Germanic base of greet².