I don’t even remember how young I was the first time I read Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”.  But a copy of the poem was laying on my cousin’s dresser when my eyes stumbled across it, looking for something that I can’t remember now.  Anyways, I read it… yet again the words sounding familiar as that invisible voice filtered each syllable through my mind.

I tried reading it as prose, paying attention to the directions given by punctuation instead of line breaks and rhyme patterns.  Even then, it was hard to break away from the rhythmic flow of the writing.  I wanted to read it this way, plainly, to try to grasp the full and raw meaning of it, behind the gimmicks of poetry.

But now I’m probably confused more than before rereading the poem.  A lot of people assume this poem is about being different or daring to lead a life that most other wouldn’t dare to live; and most people assume this leads to a good thing.  Or at least, maybe that’s what I’ve always taken away from reading this.  But now that I’m at such a pivotal point in my life, i’m at the wood, and it’s so very yellow.  I can’t seem to make a choice.  I’m doing more than peeking down each road… I’m trying to ask others, trying to dip my toes into both sides.  It’s so very “walk to remember” of me… trying to be at two places at once, haha.

I wonder if the speaker in “The Road Not Taken” regrets his choice.  I mean, the title of the poem IS the road NOT taken.  Does that mean that’s the focus of his thoughts?… the road that he DIDN’T take?  I don’t know.  I’ve spent most of my life not really thinking about my life.  But I’ve spent that past few years/months trying to avoid it, and I’m slowly being forced to realize that the more I avoid deciding what life I want to live… my life is slipping away from underneath me.

I heard praying to God helps everything.  I’m hoping and expecting that it does.  I mean, the man upstairs most likely has more to offer than Robert Frost.