“Everything okay?”
He turned the screen facedown.
“Yeah.”
“You don’t look okay.”
He sighed.
“My mother called. She’s worried about money again. She keeps saying I need to make this opportunity count because she can’t afford to help me if something goes wrong.”
I sat in the armchair opposite him.
“That’s a lot of pressure.”
“Sometimes I feel like everybody has already decided what my life is supposed to look like.”
“You’re allowed to change your mind.”
“Would you?”
“Change my mind?”
“If you could go back ten years, would you still choose the life you have now?”
The question caught me off guard.
I looked toward the dark windows.
“I don’t know.”
He waited.
“I love parts of my life,” I continued. “But I think I spent a long time believing that if I made all the right decisions, I’d eventually stop feeling uncertain.”
“Did it work?”
I smiled sadly.
