I am sitting in the kitchen while the fridge does that low, rattling hum that sounds like it’s about to give up the ghost. It’s 2 AM and the air in this house is heavy, like it’s made of wet wool. I’ve been in this zip code since I was six years old. I went from my mother’s house to a dorm for exactly three months before Sarah got pregnant and we signed the papers at the courthouse. We didn't even have a cake, just a pack of gas station donuts and a mortgage that felt like a win at the time. Now I look at the walls and all I see is the 2.5% interest rate keeping me in a coffin with central heating. Is that weird? To feel like your life is just a very long, very polite hostage situation? My hands always smell like lemon-scented dish soap and lukewarm mac and cheese. That’s my "independent adulthood"—scrubbing the crust off a plastic Paw Patrol plate while the toddler screams because the juice is the wrong shade of yellow. I never had a key to an apartment that was just mine. I never ate cereal over a sink at midnight without worrying about the crunch waking up three people who depend on me for their literal survival. It’s like I skipped the part of the movie where the protagonist finds himself and went straight to the part where he’s an extra in the background of a Diaper Genie commercial. Sometimes I think about just driving. Not anywhere specific, just until the gas light flickers, but then I remember the alternator is whining and a tow truck would cost more than our grocery budget for the week. Sarah is great. She’s the same girl who used to share her fries with me behind the bleachers, only now she’s tired in a way that looks like gray paint under her eyes. We’re like two old shoes that have been molded together by the rain—comfortable, I guess, but there’s no tread left. We talk about the property taxes and the furnace and whose turn it is to take Leo to soccer. It’s all so procedural. There’s this profound stasis in being a "family man" before you’ve even figured out how to be a person. I feel like a suit of armor with nobody inside of it, just hollow metal standing in a hallway making sure the kids don't kill each other. I saw a guy at the hardware store today who looked my age, maybe younger. He was buying one lightbulb and a single bottle of expensive bourbon. He looked so light.