I don't know if this really counts as a confession, not in the way some of the others I’ve read here seem to be. It’s not a secret I keep from anyone, not explicitly. More like a quiet, internal sort of dissonance, a low hum beneath the surface of my days. I think maybe it’s a form of regret, or perhaps just a persistent wistfulness that’s settled in my bones these past… well, decades now, really. I’m looking out my office window, you see. It’s late. The building across the way, a little brick place, has a sign in its window – “Willow Creek Pottery Studio.” They leave a soft light on, a warm, inviting glow that spills onto the wet pavement. I can almost smell the damp clay, the faint scent of woodsmoke from a kiln that isn't even there, not really. It’s just an echo in my mind. I remember my own hands, caked with clay. Earth, water, fire. There’s something so elemental about it, isn’t there? The malleability, the way a form emerges from a lump, guided by nothing but touch and intuition. I had such a… *predilection* for it, I suppose. A natural aptitude, my professors used to say. I was at the state university, enrolled in their fine arts program. Ceramics, mostly, but I dabbled in printmaking too, and even some abstract painting. I was alive then, in a way that feels utterly alien to me now. My days were long, messy, punctuated by the clatter of tools and the quiet hum of concentration. I felt… integrated. Whole. My parents, bless their hearts, they never quite understood. They were good people, practical people. My father worked at the steel mill, my mother cleaned houses. They saw art as a hobby, a pleasant diversion, not a viable *vocation*. They’d watch me come home, covered in plaster dust or clay slip, and their faces would hold this peculiar blend of concern and resignation. “How will you make a living, dear?” my mother would ask, her voice soft, tentative, as if fearing my artistic temperament might shatter at the question. My father was more direct. “Art won’t pay the bills, Evelyn. You need a steady job. Something with a pension.” And they were right, of course. Rationally, logically, they were absolutely correct. The student loans were piling up. My little attic apartment above the bakery was charming but drafty, and the landlord wasn't accepting payment in abstract ceramic forms, much to my chagrin. I started to feel the *pressure*. Not from them, not really. More from an internalised sense of obligation. A self-imposed imperative to justify their sacrifices, to make their worried frowns disappear. I started looking at things differently. At my art, at my future. I began to see it not as a boundless field of creative exploration, but as a narrowing tunnel, leading potentially to… what? Poverty? A life perpetually on the brink? That fear, it was a slow, insidious thing. It crept in, bit by bit. Then the opportunity presented itself. An entry-level position at a marketing firm. Data entry, initially, but with a promise of advancement. “A foot in the door,” the recruiter had said, his smile bright and reassuring. “Good benefits, stable hours, room to grow.” It was everything my parents had ever wanted for me. Everything I thought, deep down, I *should* want. I remember standing in the dean's office, my application for a deferment in my hand, but I just… I couldn’t articulate why I wanted to stay. My passion felt like a frivolous indulgence when weighed against the tangible security of a paycheck. I withdrew. Quietly. No fanfare. Just a slow, deliberate turning away from the path I had so earnestly believed was mine. I moved into a small apartment downtown, traded my paint-splattered jeans for sensible suits, and learned the jargon of brand identity and market segmentation. I was good at it, surprisingly. My artistic eye, I found, lent itself well to aesthetics, to composition, to understanding how to capture attention. I moved up the ladder. Promotions, raises, a corner office with a view – this very window, in fact. I got the health insurance. The pension. Everything they had wanted. And I bought them a house, a little bungalow with a rose garden my mother had always dreamed of. They were so proud. So genuinely, deeply proud. And I… I never told them, or anyone, about the hollow ache that started to form, right behind my breastbone. It’s been fifty years. Fifty years of perfectly adequate, stable, successful work. Fifty years of knowing, intellectually, that I made the right choice, the *sensible* choice. And yet… every single evening, when the city lights begin to glitter and the last of my colleagues have gone home, I sit here for a while longer. I watch that little pottery studio. I imagine the artists inside, their hands covered in clay, their minds lost in the tangible creation of something beautiful, something from nothing. I don’t know if it’s regret. Or just a quiet, persistent longing for a self I never fully became. A counterfactual existence, perhaps. I wonder if that’s a common human experience. This quiet mourning for the road not taken. I just… I wonder what my hands would have made. What story they would have told.