Les regrets sont les cicatrices du cœur (lay ruh-gray sohn lay see-ka-trees dy kuhr)
Neologized and first used by Sadia Hakim, this statement means “Regrets are the scars of the heart.”
The word cicatrices comes from the Latin cicatrix, meaning “scar,” and is widely used in both medical and botanical contexts to describe the marks left after healing—whether on skin, trees, or even wounded landscapes.
It conveys how past decisions, missed chances, and unspoken words carve themselves into us, leaving marks that never fully fade. Regrets do not stay as open wounds, but they settle deep beneath the surface—silent, unhealed, waiting for the right moment to ache again.
Just as every scar on the skin tells a story of pain and survival, every regret is a testament to the choices that shaped us, the lessons learned too late, and the pieces of ourselves we left behind.
I’ve sat with this thought longer than I can say—how we are made of remnants of things that came before us. The iron in our blood was forged in collapsing stars, the elements in our bones belonged to something ancient, something lost, yet they are still here, still a part of us. Regrets are no different.
They are the weight of past selves pressing against our ribs, ghosts of moments that once burned through us and then turned to ash. We cannot erase them, nor can we return to the moments that birthed them, but like the universe reshaping the wreckage of dying stars into something new, we, too, take our regrets and build from them—something wiser, something stronger, something that still knows how to survive.
— Sadia Hakim // Neo-Logophilia Series