You can't go back and it's a shame

You can't go back and it's a shame.
I came out so late (too late!)
living a failed, phantom version of the life I should have lived,
because I was too afraid to live it.

Not great!
Not good.

So now, when I see a handsome blond man
with a nice mustache who's 25,
in a relationship,
all these middle-aged regrets come crashing down.

I'm an ongoing disaster,
but maybe
if I'd come out earlier
I could have met this nice man
at 25,
or a mustachioed man much like him,
and felt, what,

Actually Content?
Perhaps.
Perhaps.
Perhaps.

To be sure,
I might have fucked it up then too.
Probably.
Almost certainly.
So I am forced to consider
the wretched possibility
that this incarnation is,
for me personally,
this soul,
this eternal being,
learning what it feels like to fail
utterly
simply for lack of trying,
simply because
that is the choice I make
over and over,
not to mention repeatedly.

After making the same mistake,
the same,
the same,
every time,
for no good reason,
you start to suspect,
maybe,
possibly,
there might be a theme,
a rut,
a scratch in the groove of your life record
that keeps skipping
and skipping
and skipping
on the same note,
the same thought,
the same bad habit
and it really makes you think
just before the record skips again
in the same damn spot.

Jesus Christ,
why?
But also, what, who, how.
When?
Now.
Again and again and again.

But still.
Record skips and bad choices,
ongoing and robust,
aside, well to the side,
but still making all that racket,

I think about that mustachioed man
I hope to one day meet
before the bittersweet heat death of the universe,
and somewhat more pointedly,
before the last quiet gasp
of the pragmatically unified organs
and systems
I have, somewhat fondly,
come to think of as me,
and not fucking it up
for lack of trying.

Because you can't go back,
and it's a shame.