Prologue: The Road Not Taken- second draft

Prologue: “The Road Not Taken”
Robert Frost. 1875–

67. The Road Not Taken

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 20



Letting go of someone you lost without control or influence is like pulling off a Band-Aid. Year by year you tug at another corner, hoping to loosen up the adhesive goo, to wear it down until one day perhaps the Band-Aid will fall off of it’s own volition.
Year by year, I lift a corner here or there, thinking I might act like it’s gone, but that’s the point of flesh-color bandages: if you squint under the right light, you can’t make out where the Band-Aid ends and you begin.
Every once in a while I expose it to the air and sun and it stings, it burns, so I cover it back up. Now I take a deep breath, take a swig of my Chardonnay and rip off the Band-Aid one final time.
The anticipation makes me dizzy for underneath there’s a goodbye as permanent as the scar it leaves behind. It’s been so long now; I can barely remember the hurt that it’s hiding—the scar that runs vein deep.
In reality, we have to let stories and plots fray and unravel in order to maintain the greater tapestry. But somewhere, the soul needs choice. The soul needs a place to play out the moments that almost were or at least almost could be.
A writer possesses the power to rewrite history. With a stroke on the keyboard or a swipe of my pen I can reinterpret certain events to play out the choice I was never given. With a strike of the deletion key I can erase my mistakes, erase my humiliation and pain. The question is where do I want to rewrite it? Where do I want to stop reality to play out the way I wonder things could have been or to play out the gut-wrenching decision I didn’t have to make? Until I know what decision I would make, I will always doubt myself.
Robert Frost speaks of his two roads. Walking one afternoon, he came across two roads that were in essence equals, two paths, one “as just as fair/ And having perhaps the better claim/ Because it was grassy and wanted wear.” Many readers interpret the poem to be about Carpe Diem—seize the day…the “road less travelled”…taking the high road. But, I think that Frost’s roads were equal in their traffic, equal in their travelling, and arrived at virtually the same location. The choice became a matter of gut, of instinct, of initial preference.
How noble it is to think back on these two roads and determine that one was the more difficult, that we were in fact blazing a new path! As the drama of our lives unfold, perhaps we realize that there was very little drama indeed and that’s when we decide those two roads were in fact unequal paths to our future selves.
We make our decision to embark on one path, reminding ourselves that the other will always be available once we are past our youth, “Oh, I marked the first for another day!\Yet knowing how way leads on to way\ I doubted if I should ever come back.” Then again, when will we ever be back at that specific crossroad?
In our youth we make choices that set us on our own “road well traveled.” It’s only once we pass the point of no return that we begin to remember fondly the “road not taken.” Not until the moment passes us by, the moment of decision, of direction, of destiny that we fabricate that second, lesser road. What is it that we wish to redeem in ourselves? Is it a matter of pride that we deem, five, ten, twenty years later that we made a morally defendable choice in our youth?
Is it a defense mechanism? Perhaps if we think back to that point when we faced two indistinguishable paths when we understood very little about the consequences of life and situation, then we feel the urging sensation to deflect that moment of ignorance and now pretend that we knew all along how this well-traversed path would deliver us.
Is it a romantic ideal? Who doesn’t want to be the hero or heroine of his or her own story? By placing ourselves in a moment of crisis of conscience, then perhaps we empower ourselves to say, “I made the right choice. I chose the best path and I’m better for it.” When in fact, we secretly acknowledge that no path is truly better than another; it’s just different.
To rewrite history is to be powerful. To claim the choices and consequences as our own doing is to become 100% in control of our current situations.
What would happen, though, if, when we did think back and say with a sigh, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,\ I took the one less traveled by,\ And that has made all the difference.”
Did it? Did it really make all the difference or did the difference appear once we reached the end? Did the “difference” manifest out of repressed disappointments and fears, unresolved feelings and reoccurring dreams? Or was there ever really a difference worth mentioning.
The great losses and joys in my life led me to this crossroad—these two divergent paths. The highways, dark and tortuous as they may have been, brought me here and held the signs that I needed---but in the blur I couldn’t read them. So which path did I choose?
My roads appear behind me as indistinguishable from another as one highway is to the next. But, what if suddenly, one road became a greater struggle than the other? What if one path, “the road not taken,” became the object of closer examination? What then would I discover about myself when offered the choice I was never presented?
Now, “ages and ages hence,” “I will tell this with a sigh” mine was not the path “less travelled by.” It was simply a path no greater or lesser than another, just different.