I wrote this spoken word poem while exploring my gender from the perspective of regret. Specifically, I was questioning how I’d feel at the end of my life, if I chose the easy road, denying my identity and continuing to live unauthentically. At the time I was contemplating if I should pursue transition, be it social or medical.

While the poem was primarily written as an exercise in exploration, a secondary goal was to perhaps perform it at a poetry open mic I regularly attend. I eventually decided against performing. Nerves got the better of me. I may yet perform it one day.

Even though I never performed it, this poem achieved its main goal. While I was still uncertain about transition, I realized that I was very, very certain about one thing: that I’d regret it if I didn’t at least try.

The Path Not Taken

He sat along the shore, upon a weathered seat. The wood, pockmarked with age, warped from its many years in the sun, its surface roughed from the salty sea breeze, yet edges smoothed from bodies at ease. His joints creaked as he moved, and so did the chair. They were old friends, of a sort.

The sun blazed, painting the skies with reds and oranges and golds. Clouds splayed themselves wildly across the heavens with abandonment, playful and chaotic and beautiful, as if celebrating amidst the day’s final moments. Waves frothed up the sand, beginning with a thunderous roar and tapering to a gentle roll.

He gazed into the horizon, unmoving. His fingers absentmindedly traced a wooden knot, every groove and curve as familiar as his own skin. He had lived a life full of meaning. He’d fought for his country. He’d taught countless curious minds, shaping and influencing, then letting them loose to find their own way. He’d built this chair. He’d seen the world, his wife by his side. His children had grown and left and found their own happiness. Friends had come and gone, mostly gone. To all it would seem, a life fulfilled.

And yet.

Within the depths of memories past, there laid a fork in the road. On the one, it continued straight, paved and friendly and signposted. The other, grassy and strewn with leaves, a narrow trail soon bending out of sight into shadowed trees.

His heart ached for the latter. Down that path was a possibility of a light brighter and more glorious than anything that has come before, his heart said, an illumination that will nestle within his very core. No, his brain rejected, down it lay uncertainty and risk and turmoil, a danger that could see his life uprooted.

He stood before the two as indecision warred within him. He took a step. His feet slapped upon hard stone as he made his way down the path more comfortable. He’ll be back, he told his heart. One day, he’ll revisit this fork, and one day, perhaps he’ll choose the one less travelled.

He returned over the years, at first frequently, then less so. Soon a decade passed between visits, then more. And one day, he stepped, again, onto that paved path for the final time. The wanting ache his heart had once beheld now nestled within his core.

The sun waned, dipping below the horizon. Reds fading into blue and oranges into purple. Clouds drifted lazily, tired from their dancing. Stars peeked through the dark, waking to keep watch upon the sleeping world.

He sat upon the shore, and as the light retreated and as the darkness closed in around him and as that ache within his heart pulsed a final time, he closed his eyes, and breathed his last.

He, who might have been a She.