Under Summer Sky • Zarry

29. I don't regret it

"Falling in love with Renée was not the kind of thing you walk away from in one piece. I had no chance. She put a hitch in my git-along. She would wake up in the middle of the night and say things like "What if Bad Bad Leroy Brown was a girl?" or "Why don't they have commercials for salt like they do for milk?" Then she would fall back to sleep, while I would lie awake and give thanks for this alien creature beside whom I rested." ― Rob Sheffield, Love is a Mixtape

I loved the way that Rob loved Renée in his book that I was reading. He wrote all about the language of love and how music had brought them together, and the way that songs can affect people, shape relationships and the memories that they make along the way, creating mixtapes of everything that they had shared together before she passed away.

It was beautiful but sad, and I felt both moved and inspired by his story and words, now beginning to look at my own life as a series of events and feelings that each had a corresponding song to go with it; a song for just about everything ― the good, the bad, and everything in between.

The song of the moment for me that day was Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell, which was now blaring through my 1970 Ford Capri as my arm hung freely out of the open window, my ringed fingers tapping on the side of the door as I drove down the streets of London that Friday afternoon.

And something resonated with me when Joni sang you don't know what you've got till it's gone.

That lyric stuck to me like glue.

I was thinking about the concept of regret just then, and how it was never something that I wanted to live with.

And I thought about how sometimes you don't realize how important things really are when you have them in your possession, but then it all starts to make more sense later in life when you find those things are not around anymore.

I didn't want to view anything with a sense of regret. Not my relationship with Zayn or even that lost period in between losing him in my life and now finding him again. 

Because regardless of the outcomes, I was still glad that he and I happened in the first place, and maybe in some strange twist of fate, I was also glad to have been away from him for so long.

I had thought about this all week long in fact, and I came to the conclusion recently that Zayn's presence felt much more meaningful to me now.

There was a freeness that came along with letting go of regret that brought forth a self acceptance that I never had before as well, the ability to welcome and appreciate both the light and the darkness that make up a person, which had also eradicated my former tendency to be self-loathing over my flaws.

All people were flawed, like Zayn said. No matter how hard I tried to change and be perfect, I never would be. And that was okay. 

Luckily, Marco hired an additional co-manager for Stella's to help us out on the weekends now, a buff guy named David that I hadn't met yet.

I was beyond thankful that he had done this because it would allow me to get home earlier in the night sometimes and it would also give Marco the ability to spend more time with his family.

Marco had given me today off, too, which was a rare occurrence because I hadn't had a Friday night to myself in several months.

And it would have been the perfect opportunity for me and Silas to finally have a date night, but he had a work conference with the BPS and some counseling workshop in Manchester and wouldn't be back until tomorrow.

I also couldn't hang out with Gemma and Adrienne because they had gone up to Bath for their spa weekend, Jeff was wild camping with Zach and his cousin Cameron in Port Isaac, Cornwall and Marco was training David, so that meant my options for a social life were limited to primarily just Nick, who would be going to Stella's anyway because it was Friday.