You might have heard that everyone has a moment in their life which they wish that they could turn back. A matter of a few seconds, minutes, hours or days, and something irreversible happens. I went through one such moment in my life, recently. The feeling was quite alien. All those stories about something happening in your chest during such moments are true. It feels strange when it happens, a feeling of uneasiness in your chest, right in the area where the heart is supposed to be. At first, you wouldn't know what struck you. It hits you like a tsunami. All balance in life is lost and you go blank. There is an emptiness inside, and everything gets blurry. The first few minutes after the realization are not registered in your memory. It feels as if something is ripping your heart out and your soul is being pulled out of the body. Everything becomes silent. The noise of traffic, people talking around you, the stray dog that's sniffing your feet, everything is invisible and inaudible. As you start to soak it inside you, a zone starts forming around you. It is analogous to being resistive to changes in general. You need some time to adjust to the new reality. Just as you start accepting it and become a little more stable, another thing hits you.
Now comes the time when you think about the consequences of what has happened. You start analyzing how long the effects of this might last. It starts with a week. Then, as you start imagining various scenarios, it increases to a year. As time passes, you realize that it has the potential to ruin tens of years of your life. That is when you feel you have hit the rock bottom. That one moment, one situation can change your life altogether. All the plans you made for your future, everything you thought about doing, even the plans that are a month away from being executed are at risk. All of a sudden, life goes from being all planned out into existential crisis. The thought that this one event could be the reason that the next 40 to 50 years of your life are changed for worse is dreadful. You make an effort to not think too far and concentrating on the next step. You try to move on from this by working with something else at hand. But it is to no avail as the chest still feels weird, constantly reminding you of what has happened. The next in line is that you want to let it out and talk to someone. But at that very moment, you want to be alone and distance yourself from everything around you. The brain gets stuck in this paradox while the chest is still pounding like a greyhound.
After being lost in this paradox for a while, you start scribbling what you feel as a way to let it all out. That is when you feel a little better and gain some clarity. That is when you begin to accept what has happened and start preparing yourself to face the consequences. After you spend ten minutes into this phase, there's only one thought that remains in the back of your mind: 'If only I could undo it.'