I was cleaning out my desk today, finally getting around to it after… oh, I don’t know, probably a decade. This city apartment, you know, it accumulates things, layers of forgotten minutiae, and I’m just trying to declutter before my knees give out completely and I can’t reach that top shelf anymore. Anyway, tucked behind a stack of old library conference programs (the kind with the terribly dated graphics, all clip art and gradients) I found it. A postcard. From him. It was a picture of some lighthouse, very dramatic, waves crashing, all that romantic seaside gloom. And on the back, in his distinctive, slightly sprawling hand, just a few lines. “The house is perfect, love. Come. The ocean air would do you good. We’d be happy here, I know it. X” Just a simple X. Like he always did. It just… stopped me cold. Like a sudden episode of cardiac arrhythmia, that kind of jolt. I remember the exact moment it arrived, that day. I was at the reference desk, helping some graduate student decipher microfiche (remember microfiche? GOD). And I read it, and I tucked it away, and I went back to my life. My ambitious, scholarly, urban life. I had my career, my colleagues, my intellectual pursuits. The thought of just… leaving it all for a small coastal town, for a man who primarily expressed his affection through long walks on the beach and surprisingly good clam chowder… it felt like a regression. Like I was betraying some core principle of who I was supposed to be. A betrayal of all the effort I’d put into building this particular identity. (Is that a form of narcissistic injury, to refuse a life that doesn't align with your self-perception?) And now, seventy-six years old, in this cramped, expensive apartment that always smells faintly of exhaust fumes from the street below, I look at this postcard and I just wonder. What if? What if I’d said yes? What if I’d packed my sensible shoes and my first editions and gone to him? Would I be sitting on a porch somewhere, smelling salt and iodine instead of diesel, listening to gulls instead of sirens? Would my hands, now arthritic and mottled, be stained with garden soil instead of ink from an overdue book notice? He was a gentle soul. A bit melancholic, perhaps, a tendency toward anhedonia when things got too stressful, but kind. Always kind. And he loved the sea with a fierce, almost primal devotion. My life here, it’s been… fulfilling, in its own way. I chaired committees, I published articles, I mentored bright young minds. I married a man who understood the value of a well-researched argument and a quiet evening with PBS. He was a good man. A stable anchor in a sometimes-turbulent professional sea. But there was never that… that specific kind of ache, that yearning for a different horizon, that I feel looking at this faded piece of cardboard. No, that was reserved for this one, singular, unchosen path. It’s not regret, not exactly. More like a persistent, low-grade sense of cognitive dissonance. The life I lived, versus the life I could have lived. The self I became, versus the self I abandoned. Sometimes, late at night, when the city quiets down to a low hum, I think about that lighthouse. And I imagine the spray on my face, and his arm around my shoulders, and the quiet satisfaction of a life lived by the rhythm of the tides. A life without tenure battles or budget cuts or the crushing pressure of keeping up with ever-evolving digital platforms. Just the vast, indifferent ocean. And him. And me. (Perhaps it’s just the romanticization of an idealized past, a defense mechanism against the present’s diminishing returns.) But still. The question hangs, like a persistent fog off the coast. Would we have been happy? Or would I have found some other reason to feel like an outlier, even there, by the sea? I suppose I’ll never know. And that, I think, is the hardest part of all.