Could it have happened any differently?
Perhaps. But which fork in the road was it?
Where does the path start to unravel?
A change in the way things are
Would have changed everything else as well.

For all the mistakes bemoaned, lessons
Learned – unless vanity stands in the way –
Or the same error repeated
With different actors playing the same role –
Hero and villain alike.

And the split between people of insignificance and
The people that matter – faces splashed on
Tabloids and magazine covers –
The invisible reduced to mere shadows
Floating on the fringes of light.

Shadows have a way of defining the light.
People have a way of shaping our lives,
Setting in motion our trajectories,
The way banks and boulders guide water in a river –
The wind, a fallen tree.

No absence made a hole in the day of someone
Who was never there.
What’s out of our control – people,
Sequences of events. What’s inevitable –
How we choose to react.