A Kind of Haunting.

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that living with a decision is often harder than making it. I suppose that’s too obvious to need stating, but the process never ceases to surprise me.

For most decisions bring forth not one but several consequences, some good and some bad. Debits and credits. Pros and cons. And of course, because the only way is forward, you aim to focus on the positive. A decision had to be made, you made it, and now you move on. That’s that; you try to forget about the bad bits. You might even try to pretend they don’t exist.

But they do exist, and they don’t go away just because you don’t want to look at them. They exist as ghosts, and they lurk in the shadows of the mind. They creep out and show their sorrowful faces to you, just when you’re least expecting it. They point at you in accusation. ‘Look what you’ve done,’ they whisper. ‘How could you?’ They try to make you feel uncertain, and they don't have to try very hard.

Maybe it’s an awareness that you have caused, or might have caused, an innocent person to suffer in some way. Maybe it’s a sense of your own sorrow at having given up something precious. Maybe it’s both, or even more.

Whatever it is, the mind becomes a haunted place. And there’s little you can do about it except wait for the spirits of consequence to die a second death naturally and drift away on the winds of time. Meanwhile, you find yourself, like Macbeth, murdering sleep.