Pondering...

"...And that was it—just those two breathless weeks,
then years of mild regret and intermittent speculation.

Being happy is mostly like that. You don’t see it up close.
You recognize it later from the ache of memory.
And you can’t recapture it. You only get to choose
whether to remember or forget, whether to feel remorse
or nothing at all. Maybe it wasn’t really love.
But who can tell when nothing deeper ever came along?"

Excerpt from “Being Happy” by Dana Gioia from 99 Poems. © Graywolf Press, 2016.
From The Writer's Almanac