just write it all out

Regret

08/01/2016

What do you want your legacy to be?

As stupid and sadist as it may seem, I want people to regret not being friends with or not dating me. Fame is too stressful, making history too controversial, curing cancer too technical. Sure, those are great. But I want my legacy to be something emotional in the back of someone's mind.

I want to be someone people think about when they're asked, "Who do you regret not getting to know better?"

Not in the sense that I'm famous and they can have a little personal anecdote, or the sense that they never reached out to me and now could not. But in the sense that life may have been changed, maybe more interesting, or just better, with me in it.

I want to be someone's subconscious muse, for a song, a book, a speech, a simple Facebook post. I want to trigger loads of old but good memories tinged with pain, bittersweet endings. I want to be thought of, not consistently and consciously, but as a bit more than an afterthought.

I want my legacy to live on in the minds of only a few people. But within those few minds, I want the memories of me, the thought of me, to slowly fester in the back of the mind and only resurface for brief but rare moments. A poster of my favorite band, the scarf I knitted and gave to them, a #tbt on Instagram. Just small little things that remind them of me, and they stop and regret for a second, and then move on.

I don't want pain or bitterness to saturate their thoughts of me, because that's too much, and that means there's something unresolved.

All I want to leave behind is those brief moments of longing, and wondering what might have been.

And then they move on.

That is what I want my legacy to be.