I meet my younger self for coffee

I meet my younger self for coffee. (She still only drinks chai tea.)

How can I leave? she asks. This must be as good as it gets.I know she wakes up at three am gasping the opposite: This can’t be all there is.

It isn’t.

She dreams of good enough. She looks so small. She wonders how anyone can love her, and I’m ashamed of my flicker of agreement: I don’t tell her I look back as a stranger thinking thank god we are not the same. I sit around a campfire with her college friends and roast them—lovingly—trying to ask why they stuck around.

What made you stick around?

She’s engaged. I’m married. There is a lifetime of pain between those sentences, landmarks she can navigate only if she stops trying to write herself into existence and starts trying to live a life worth writing about—She isn’t there yet.

She’s here, checking her phone the instant it pings atop the table. He needs a picture of who she’s with (they’ll fight about this later) but won’t tell me the truth so I won’t tell her the obvious.

You’re not in love! I want to scream. This isn’t normal.She already knows.

My world is ending, she breathes, and for once it isn’t drama. She is about to tidal wave her future, cascade hurt in all directions, collapse the precarious foundation of an unexamined life—I tell her she’ll build a new one.

Look, I smile, hands outstretched. Look how I’ve built a new one.