A/N: You can decide who is talking.

Paths

Stretched out before me is a spider web of choices. Strands crissing and crossing, intersecting, leading to and from one another. Seemingly towards infinity…. or oblivion.

I was the focal point of the web, and each choice, word, action, feeling, emotion takes on one path or another.

And now I am so far away from the center that I can clearly see what brought me to this point. The advantage, or curse, of hindsight. Those precise moments where it all went right, and far more often, where it went horrifically wrong. It's like watching a movie and you're yelling at the screen, telling yourself not to open the door because the murderer is standing behind it, brandishing a knife.

No matter how much you scream, you never hear yourself, and you reach for the knob anyway, every single time. All the while other people are shushing you, telling you to be quiet.

I can see the other strands too, the proverbial road not taken.

Remember when you were little? Instead of raking the leaves into piles you would spread them out across the yard and rake a maze to play tag with. And while you were raking you were trying in vain to memorize the paths that would lead you to safety and the ones that were the dead ends that would guarantee your capture. Inevitably though, despite the careful planning, you would go down that dead end, even when you were so careful as to avoid it.

I remember the leaf maze because sooner or later I would go down that dead end. It was a mistake that carried little consequences. I would then be 'it' and I would bide my time until someone else made that same mistake.

The mistakes we make now are a little more dire; the price of which can be almost impossibly high.

Strands snap and break and disappear every minute of everyday because everyone's webs are interconnected, or they will be, or won't be any longer. Choices made by one affect countless others, a few others, and in the rare cases, no others; whether they mean to or not.

I remind myself of someone I used to know. That girl standing at the center, looking at the choices that lay out before her like some selection in a department or candy store.

My god, she is impossibly far away.

I wonder if she would recognize me. Or perhaps shrink away in horror of what I have become.

I've made some wrong choices, to varying degrees, some so much that I cannot bring myself to speak about them. We all atone for our sins in different ways. Different punishments, different amends. It's just as easy to pick up the lash to flog ourselves as it is to pick up the rosaries.

I don't ever think I told you I was sorry. And I am. For all that went wrong, and all that could still go wrong.

I'm not looking for the forgiveness of a deity. If I were I would be having this conversation in a great stone building with a man who doesn't know me and never will. With nothing more than a thin wire screen separating us.

Burning in hell can't hold a candle to what I feel now.

All I want is your forgiveness. Then maybe I could forgive myself. Stop the senseless beatings. Silence the angels from screaming. Stop the wounds that no one else can see from bleeding.

Maybe we could just stop pretending for a little while?

Maybe at the end of our webs we are sitting in rocking chairs on a porch somewhere. Just sitting, and watching and waiting and remembering the paths that led us to the same point. Vastly different, but somewhat similar.

Will it happen? Doubtful, as mastering the art of looking ahead is far more difficult than looking at the past.

Just the same we wait and watch to see where the strands will take us. Powerless, but also in control at the same time.