Strange Presentiment

Today I was struck by a vague sense of loss; an inescapable longing for something that I never knew but may have unwittingly stumbled past. The full impact of its nature is lost on me, my ignorance now acting as a merciful shield against some truth too painful to truly absorb.

Instead there is only a dull sense of remorse, that bitter cocktail of nostalgia and regret. The feeling came about unexpectedly, and will shortly be drowned out in the white noise of living. I do not even have a name for what I am mourning. Or perhaps who?

John Greenleaf Whittier once wrote: For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, "It might have been". Despite what Clarence and the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future would have you believe, the cruelest fate is to know what might have been when it can no longer be.