What did I choose everytime I didn’t choose art?

I swallowed my words for a while,
I made a marble object of my tongue,
I got scared by the permanence
of the strings of sentences I could form
into any creation,
and how they’d mark a moment in time in which
maybe I would later find regret.
I forgot that the permanence
was the point,
that the tangibility of stories and whispers of words
that could speak to a million different lives and hopes
and answers being sought
was the point.