No Regrets
Before the clock strikes midnight, you have to confess your regret. If you don't, you lose a precious memory.
Here's something nobody tells you about the big romantic moments of your life. They're almost never actually romantic. They're sweaty and badly timed to when you're wearing exactly the wrong bra. See, the movies give you rain-soaked confessions and airport sprints, but real life gives you a converted warehouse in Gowanus and a glowing orb that can smell your emotional cowardice before it steals your best memories (I’ll explain shortly).
Anyway, real life gives you years of almost, and then one night where almost has to become something else or it disappears entirely. I used to think the brave thing in these situations was saying how you felt. Now I think maybe the brave thing is deciding whether you'd rather lose the memory of wanting someone or live with the memory of telling them. I still don't know which one I would have chosen, if I'd had the chance to choose.
After all, I want to live a life with no regrets.
The invitation to the New Year’s Eve party had said dress for your softest self, which meant I just had to wear the sweater I'd stolen from by best friend Cole in 2019 and never returned. He notices immediately when we meet at the bar by the entrance. He always notices. It’s one of his more glaring flaws.
"Bold sweater choice," he says, handing me a drink that is allegedly called a Clarity Sunrise. Maybe it did have some clarity before someone dumped half a shaker of turmeric into it.
“Oh please, it’s cashmere," I say. "You don't miss it."
“Oh, I miss it constantly."
We’re standing in the foyer of the aforementioned converted warehouse in Gowanus, surrounded by maybe sixty people who have all signed the same waiver in order to attend. The walls are painted a color I can only describe as therapeutic coral.
Cole looks good. He’s gotten a haircut recently that makes his jawline a tad more aggressive, not that it was precisely tame before. I haven’t seen him since September, when we'd split a burrata at that place in Fort Greene and talked about everything except the thing we never talk about.
"You read the full consent packet for this thing?” he asks.
"I skimmed it.”
"Ariana."
“Come on, I retained the important parts. The rules are simple, blah blah blah. We have to confess one true regret at midnight. It can't be strategic or performative or whatever." I take another sip of the Clarity Sunrise, which doesn’t clarify a thing. “Do it right, and you stop regretting it entirely. But if you chicken out, you lose a memory you actually don’t regret. Some neural eraser thing or whatever. Either way, we leave here with 1,000 American dollars.”
“It’s not a ‘neural eraser thing,’ it’s a targeted memory attenuation," Cole says. "It's in the FAQ."
“Which you apparently memorized like an insane person.”
"I'm a thorough person."
“Fine, you’re a thoroughly insane person.”
He smiles, which sends a beam of warmth right into my face, forcing me to smile, too. “Maybe we both are for actually choosing to do this.”
A woman in a lavender jumpsuit clinks a fork against her glass. Her name tag says Bria (she/her) – Facilitator. She has the immediately recognizable energy of someone who did ayahuasca exactly once and never has never shut up about it.
"Welcome, welcome, welcome to Lumina's Midnight Release experience," she says. "Tonight, we're going to do something truly radical. We're going to stop holding on to what doesn't serve us!”
Cole leans close. His breath is warm against my ear. "She said 'serve us' like she’s our waiter."
"Shh,” I hush.
"Tonight," Bria continues, "each of you will be invited to share a genuine regret. The kind of regret that burrows in your chest. The kind of regret you've been metabolizing for years."
“Is her stomach in her chest?” Cole asks.
“SSSSH,” I hush even louder.
Bria presses her hand to her heart. "Our system is designed to detect user authenticity. If your confession isn’t true—if it's something you're comfortable admitting—the system will know. And it will reject it. The system also won’t accept a regret you’ve already confessed before.”
A murmur ripples through the room. A fraternity-looking dude near the bar laughs nervously.
"But here's the beautiful part," Bria continues. "If you refuse to confess, or if your confession doesn't pass, you won't leave empty-handed. The system will release you from a memory you do value. A joyful one. A precious one. Something you would never choose to lose."
She says this like it’s a good thing, and I’m starting to worry the $1,000 pay for all this is a lie.
"Questions?"
A man with a topknot raises his hand. “Yeah…what if I don't have any regrets?"
Bria smiles. "Then you have nothing to fear. Good luck, everyone.”
The next two hours are a bit of a slow-motion car crash. They start with the enthusiastic volunteers who clearly have nothing better to do than blurt out their deepest, darkest secrets to a whole bunch of strangers. A woman named Destiny confesses to stealing her sister's boyfriend in college. The system—a glowing orb mounted on a pedestal, because apparently we’re in an episode of Black Mirror—pulses green.
Accepted.
Destiny actually stars to cry, though only when people begin to applaud her.
Next up, a man named Trey confesses to lying on his grad school application. The orb turns yellow, then red. Rejected. Trey looks confused.
“Oh, I’m sorry, that's a tactical regret," Bria explains gently. "You're proud of it. The system can tell."
“What? But I’m not proud of it!”
"You're proud you got away with it."
Trey's face goes slack. A moment later, he blinks. Looks around the room like he’s misplaced something. "Wait," he says. "What were we—" He touches his temple. "I had this memory. My daughter's first steps. I was just thinking about it earlier today, and now it's—"
He sits down heavily. No one moves to comfort him.
By eleven, I have a master plan. I’ll confess something medium. Something that sounds vulnerable but isn’t actually load-bearing. I'd been rude to a dying aunt…I'd ghosted a guy who deserved better…I’d once told my cousin I hated her and meant it.
Cole and I stand by the exposed brick, workshopping our strategies.
“No, Ariana, the aunt thing won't work," he says. "You've told that story at parties. You're already at peace with it."
"I'm not at peace with it."
"You did a tight five on it at Kelsey's birthday. Plus, Bria said it has to be something you’ve never confessed before.”
“Shit, that’s right!” I put my third drink down and clutch my forehead. “Stupid clarity cocktail thing is making me lose my touch.”
“I’m sorry,” Cole says with a raised eyebrow, “are you to have me believe you have some kind of ‘touch’ when it comes to experimental startup nonsense?”
I want to throw my drink at him. Instead, I say, “Whatever, we’re running out of time. Have you figured out your confession?"
He looks away. The orb pulses in the distance, accepting someone's admission of workplace sabotage.
“No. I…haven't decided."
“What? But you always decide. You're like a decider."
“You keep using the word ‘always’ when I think you mean ‘semi-consistently.’”
“Oh, interesting. Are you saying I always do that?”
He rolls his eyes, refusing to answer. The sound bath from the party swells, and I watch a woman near the stage start crying before she even reaches the microphone.
Eleven-thirty. The room has thinned a good deal at this point with people clustering in corners and rehearsing their shame. A man named Javon has lost his memory of proposing to his wife. He keeps asking her why she’s wearing a ring, and it’s enough to make me want to weep as we see her trying to explain through a wall of tears.
I find Cole on the fire escape, looking at the Gowanus Canal like maybe he’ll go swimming in it later.
“I think I know what you’re going to confess,” I say. "The thing."
He doesn’t ask which thing.
“Yeah. Uh. I don't know."
"Cole…”
"It might not work, Ariana. It might be considered ‘strategic.’ Like maybe I've already made peace with it."
“Well…have you?"
He turns to look at me, probably doing the mental math of how much he can say without confessing the regret entirely, thus defeating the purpose. Plus, the December wind is doing something truly cruel to his hair, making it fall across his forehead in a way that reminds me of that time in Ojai. The rehearsal dinner. The garden with the string lights. The thing we did…and then after that, the way he'd said I think we'd be terrible for each other and the way I'd agreed because it was easier than saying so let's be terrible for each other.
"I do think about it," he says. "That night. I think about what we did. And what I should have said."
“OK, well, what should you have said?"
"I don't know! Something different." He pauses. "Something true."
The orb pulses through the window. Another rejection. Another memory theft.
“Listen, if I confess it," I say, "and you don't—"
"I know."
"I lose the memory of when we…”
"I know."
"And you'd still have it. You'd remember everything, like what it felt like, and I'd just have this…this blank space where you and that moment with you used to be."
He doesn’t say anything. I wait for him to tell me he'd do it, that we'd do it together, that this whole stupid night will end with us finally saying the obvious thing out loud. That when we kissed each other for the first time, we freaked out and panicked and ruined it by pushing each other way.
“Look, I need to think," he says, before walking away.
Eleven fifty-three.
Bria has started calling the final participants. The orb glows steady, waiting. I stand near the front, my hands trembling around a drink I haven’t touched in an hour. Way too risky at this point.
Cole is somewhere behind me. I can feel him without looking. I can feel the exact gravity of our years of almost. The friendship we'd constructed since college so carefully around the crater of that single night. All the meals and texts and airport pickups, all the calibrated casualness, all the effort it took to pretend we were fine when we were actually just too afraid to function
A new woman stands at the microphone. “My name is Simone. And…I regret not telling my brother I loved him before he died."
The orb pulses. Yellow. Yellow. Green.
Simone collapses into grateful tears. The crowd exhales.
"Two more," Bria announces. "Who's ready to release?"
I’m about to take a step when I remember what that Trey guy's face looked like when he lost his memory. The confusion, the grasping. I lose my ability to move any further.
That is, until Cole appears beside me. "I'll go," he says.
"You don't have to—"
"I want to."
He walks to the microphone as the room goes quiet. The orb pulses a slow, waiting blue.
"My name’s Cole," he says. "And I regret—"
He stops. Looks at me. The look lasts long enough to become its own kind of confession.
"I regret telling someone I cared about that we'd be terrible together. I regret agreeing when she agreed. And I regret four years of pretending it didn't matter when it's the only thing that's ever mattered to me.”
The orb changes color.
Yellow.
My heart stops.
Yellow.
Cole's face goes pale.
Then…finally…green.
In my mind, the entire room erupts into cheers like Cole has just won the Super Bowl, when in reality, a few people kind of nervously clap as Cole just stands there, blinking.
Bria touches his shoulder. "Thank you for your vulnerability. You're released."
He walks back to me, his eyes wet. "You’re up,” he says.
Eleven fifty-eight. I’m the last to go. I stand at the microphone trying not to look at the orb, trying not to make a stupid joke like “my biggest regret is going last” and then losing the memory of my first kiss or something. And all these strangers are watching me, as if trying to decide if my confession will be worth the wait.
The regret, when it really comes down to it, is actually super easy for me to pick. I have the same regret Cole does, just slightly different. The same night, the same garden, the same stupid thing I said that I didn’t mean. I can say it right now, though. I can match him. We can walk out of this warehouse with our flesh wounds finally acknowledged, finally bleeding where people can see us passing out.
But I keep thinking about what it would really mean. For him to have said it first and for me to echo. For the rest of our lives to be shaped by a confession that only happened because he'd been braver and invited me out to this dystopia-fest in the first place.
And underneath that, I think something even uglier, but also truer. What if I say it, too, and he realizes it wasn't worth it? Like what if the regret is real but the wanting isn't? And what if I give him this and he looks at me the way Trey looked at the room after they took his daughter's first steps from him? Confused, empty, searching for something that used to be there?
Worse…what if my real regret isn’t really what I said but that I kissed him right before. I’m the one who initiated it. I kissed him. I ruined everything. Maybe that’s…
“Ma’am?” Bria prompts. "Whenever you're ready."
The orb is waiting. Cole is waiting. Hell, 2026 is waiting, and it’s eleven fifty-nine and so begins the countdown to my mental ball dropping all over these poor people.
I open my mouth.
“My name is Ariana, and I regret agreeing with Cole. I regret every day since. I regret the way I've loved you in silence like it was heroic when it was actually just fear.”
But…I don’t actually say any of that. Sorry for the fakeout. No, what I really say on that stage is…
"I regret not being honest about my feelings."
The orb goes yellow.
"For someone," I add hastily. "A friend."
Yellow.
"I told myself it was—"
Red.
The orb goes red.
Bria's face softens into something worse than pity and fuzzier than my sweater. “I’m so sorry. The system has determined your confession is incomplete. You've withheld too much of the truth. The memory release will proceed."
"Wait," I say. "I can try again. I can—"
"The window has closed, I’m afraid. It is now 2026.”
The orb pulses once, twice. A warmth spreads through my skull, not unpleasant, almost like a bath—
And then Ojai is gone.
OK, not all of it. I still remember being there. I know there was a wedding…right? Yeah, I think so. Some kind of party maybe. I definitely kissed someone and it was the best kiss of my life…I think. No, that’s not right. Wait, was Cole there? I’m actually not sure, and when I spin to see his reaction, I just see his face in the half-dark, and I don’t feel exactly the same as I ever have when it comes to him. There’s a quick moment of some kind of vague desire…but then it’s just…
Gone.
I stand at the microphone, trying to remember why I’m so sad.
Cole waits for me as I step down from the stage. He’s looking at me the way I’d probably look at someone who'd just gotten terrible news and didn't know it yet.
"Hey," he says.
“Hi.”
"You okay?"
I try to figure out the answer. Something’s wrong. Something’s missing. I have the shape of a box in my head, but there’s nothing inside.
"I think so?" I say. "I feel weird. Did something happen to us in Ojai? Like were you even there?”
His face does something complicated I can’t begin to figure out.
“No…uh, nothing happened," he says. “It’s just…well, it was a long time ago.”
"Oh." I touch my temple. "I feel like I forgot something big.”
"You didn't."
"Are you sure?"
He looks at me for a long time. Behind us, the party finally reaches its climax, and Bria thanks everyone for their courage. In almost every corner, champagne has started popping.
"I'm sure," Cole says.
He takes my hand. It’s warm.
"Happy New Year, Ariana."
I have no idea why I want to cry.
"Happy New Year, Cole.”
We stand there, holding hands, while everyone else starts kissing each other and taking huge swigs of champagne. I have the strangest feeling that I’m missing something obvious…something that had been true a minute ago and isn’t anymore.
But Cole’s smiling at me, and the party is so loud, and eventually the feeling fades. I go in to hug him, maybe peck his cheek because after all, he’s my best friend in the whole world, but instead, he stops me and touches my face and I know in an instant what he’s about to do. I have no idea why or how I know, but regardless, I let it happen without thinking.
He kisses me. And I kiss him back.
And it’s the best damn kiss of my life.
Author's Notes:
I decided to end 2025 with a story that merges two of my favorite genres: romance and speculative. In fact, you can easily consider No Regrets to be the spiritual successor to Behavioral Pause, albeit with a New Year's Eve twist.
My initial goal with this story was to create a character with defensive wit that feels earned rather than performed. That way, the tone of the piece wouldn't fall apart once we slide out of the rom-com format and into some more vulnerable territory. Fellow readers of Emily Henry will no doubt see that I'm borrowing quite a bit from her style, what with the thesis-like opening and playful banter throughout. But I wasn't content to just attempt an emulation of an author I admire. I wanted to attempt to emulate two of them! The second being (you guessed it) the legendary George Saunders.
The central conceit was pretty simple from the jump. I wanted to use a sci-fi device as a literalization of emotional risks. What if you had to confess your regrets, otherwise you lose a precious memory? It's just weird and vague enough to work in a story that doesn't do much to explain its technology, which was certainly purposeful. I did consider explaining more of the tech and why and how this is all happening, but I prefer the ambiguity. The story isn't about all the nitty gritty details, so I wanted to have just enough speculative set up to make the story move at a quick pace.
At first glance, this story might seem a bit straightforward, but I hope it sparks some interesting discussion regarding the ending. In my mind, it's ultimately saying that some forms of love require their own mythology to survive. Cole remembers everything about the kiss in Ojai while Ariana does not. Their final kiss, the one she thinks is their first, happens between someone carrying the full weight of their history and someone experiencing something closer to instinct.
You're reading the original ending, by the way. I attempted an alternate ending where Ariana initiates the kiss instead and the whole thing is a bit more drawn out. I think it's a nice enough way to wrap up the story, but our wonderful editor Natalia Emmons pushed me to keep the old version. Her main argument was "the darkness is the point." Yes, Ariana has more agency in that kind of ending, but the entire ethical complication is what made the original ending interesting in her view.
Cole kissing her knowing what she'd forgotten was morally ambiguous in ways that arguably elevated the story beyond standard romantic resolution. He was making a choice to enter a relationship with someone who'd been "neurologically edited" and the story doesn't say whether that is beautiful or terrible.
It took some serious consideration and debate, but ultimately I trusted Natalia's viewpoint and I'm glad I did. The alternate ending wanted to be empowering, sure, but I think it really did undercut the story's entire premise, which is about the cost of avoiding vulnerability. She lost the memory of their first kiss because she couldn't be honest, and Cole realizing that their first kiss being a precious memory simply because he sees that she lost it is what pushes him to finally put his feelings on the line and kiss the woman he loves.
Anyway, Happy New Year from all of us at Cetera Magazine. We have some new stories from new authors coming this year, and we're excited to see what 2026 has in store for our publication.
Jon Negroni is a Puerto Rican author based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s published two books, as well as short stories for IHRAM Press, The Fairy Tale Magazine, and more.
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