That autumn

On the eve of my twenty-ninth birthday and our ten year high school reunion, we were coping with decisions we’d made that got us here.

She said she wasn’t going to go. Maybe if she got her shit together, then she’d go. But otherwise, she wasn’t going to, wasn’t going to have the questions asked, questions for which she didn’t have answers. I said, but what did it matter?

But I knew what she meant. There were moments when I avoided social gatherings with people who weren’t close, those you don’t see often because I didn’t have an answer for their questions. So what are you doing these days? 

My Facebook newsfeed made my life look like a string of vacations and forays into alcoholism. Whether that was a mirror of real life was left to be said, but perception is hard to change.

Something about milestones make us look back and reflect on how we got here. Some days, I would say, marriage was never going to happen, owning a home was never going to happen. But I'm inundated by these announcements on the daily, and some days, they make me feel like I'm failing.

But the latter was never an aspiration and the former was something out of my control.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about you, wondering if I’m a disappointment in your eyes, like how you were in mine for all those years. Are you still trying? Don’t get stuck there, you've been saying.