The Road I Didn’t Take

 For more than forty years, I have been driving a road that does not feel like mine.

It is a good road.

It is paved.

It is sensible.

It has brought me shelter, food, competence, a kind of dignity.

But it is not the road I first saw when I closed my eyes at seventeen.

When I was young, I loved angles the way some girls love poetry. Geometry felt like prayer. Lines met where they were meant to meet. Equations resolved. If you respected the rules, the answer revealed itself. There was comfort in that certainty. I earned A’s without effort, as if numbers recognized me.

I asked about trigonometry because I knew I would need it. I could already see buildings in my mind — not just structures, but intentions. Space shaped by thought. Beauty made livable.

Then one afternoon, in a beige office that smelled faintly of paper and old carpet, someone older than me decided my limits.

“You’ll fail,” she said.

Not maybe. Not we’ll find a way.

Just certainty.

Failure spoken over a child has a particular sound. It does not shout. It settles. It rearranges the room. It moves into the bloodstream.

I nodded. I remember nodding.

And then I turned.

I chose the safe courses. Business. Practical. Marketable. Words that sound like protection. Words that can also mean surrender.

The years passed the way highways pass under tires — unnoticed until you look up and realize the landscape has changed.

I built a career. I became capable. Reliable. The kind of woman who understands policies and numbers and outcomes. The kind of woman people trust with their risks.

But sometimes, when I see a skyline at dusk, something inside me tightens.

It isn’t envy.

It’s recognition.

There is a version of me who understands load-bearing walls the way I understand loss tables. A version who stands in hard hats and sunlight, pointing upward. A version who did not nod in that beige office.

I carry her like a twin who chose differently.

Age has a way of sharpening certain truths. Youth believes time is endless. Age knows it is not. Regret feels different when the horizon no longer stretches infinitely ahead. It becomes less dramatic, more intimate. A quiet visitor who sits beside you at night.

But here is what I am beginning to understand:

Regret is not the same as defeat.

Regret is memory insisting on its own importance.

The dream did not die that day. It went underground. It waited.

I may never hold the title. I may never draft blueprints for towers. But architecture was never only about buildings. It was about vision. Structure. Intention.

And I am still here.

I can still design the shape of my days.

I can still build meaning into the years that remain.

I can still choose where the next road bends.

Perhaps the road I didn’t take has not vanished.

Perhaps it has been walking beside me all along, waiting for me to look left instead of straight ahead.

And perhaps the passenger seat has not been empty.

Perhaps it has been occupied by the woman I almost became — patient, unaccusing, waiting for me to invite her to drive.

currently listening to Sometimes It Snows in April, by Prince