Fine dining.

There are long weeks that feel like many days just blurring into one endless time span. My week has been like that. We’re here again on a working Saturday – words that strike fear in many otherwise relaxed minds.

If I had to chalk out an ideal Saturday night plan for tonight it would include dinner and consumption of interesting liquids but without pushing the mind off the edge.

When I imagine interesting plans, in my head I see the same people, sitting around a teak wood table, laughing and telling anecdotes. I always imagine red wine, though we hardly ever drink it, and I always imagine leaving the place bubbling with emotions of the positive variety. In my head, at the end of the day, I am dozing off in the cab or the train, weaving in and out of sleep.

Things don’t pan out exactly like that. Sometimes, people are quiet. They don’t have anything to say. Sometimes, they’d rather be elsewhere or doing something else. Sometimes, people snap and say something snide without reason and then everything just gets uncomfortable and unpleasant.

Regret is our special for tonight, you can have it with a side serving of garlic bread.

We’d probably be happier off if we could all be happy by ourselves, and if our happiness didn’t have anything to do with other people. I am definitely not like that as of this moment, and to be honest I don’t see myself being absolutely at peace just being by myself.

My mental picture of dinner plans, where the yellow lighting makes everyone glow and the wine makes people friendlier, if you take away my people from the table, the evening automatically becomes redundant. Then the lights just hurt your eyes and the wine is an unnecessary expense.

You can write it down a thousand times and it won’t change. You can say it in your mind, or out aloud, and it will still cut through your skin like tiny needles.

You can man up or wuss out. You are welcome to pretend to be at peace. You might make it and you might not. I’ll put my money on might not.

My mind is a jumble of thoughts. I don’t even have the energy to sort through them. If I start now, I am not sure where it’ll take me. It’s like untangling a pair of earphones. By the time, I finish straightening them out, I have reached work and I can’t listen to music anyway.

It slowly eats me up from within.

Regret; unforgiving and judgmental. “You asked for it.” It tells me, the cold eyes don’t blink. I know. I know.

On regular days, it finds me when I am sitting lazily, drinking lemon water and honey because apparently it’s good for you. It makes me draw in sharp breaths, in quick succession. Are there chances to be good again? Mean laughter from a dark place. No phones ring and no messages reach.

On particularly bad days, it sticks by my side, like an annoying relative in a dull marriage. Mocking me, reminding me of how I was wrong and how wrong I was. While I try and sleep, it jumps up from behind me, even in the safety of my mind, and catches me off guard.

The God of Small things has the greatest lines ever written. I quote them every chance I find.

“That’s what careless words do. They make people love you a little less.”

Love is a tricky word, it could mean different things to different people.

But there were careless words involved. That’s the thing about stuff you say. Try as you may, you can’t ever really scrub it off people’s memories.

My regret and I often have winding conversations. Needless to say, I am always defeated.