I don't even know why I'm writing this and I don't even know what I'm looking for, but I just… I had this moment today, pushing the stroller, you know, just walking around the same damn block for the hundredth time, the sun was hitting the leaves just right and everything was quiet and then suddenly it hit me, this wave of something like grief, but it's not grief because nothing died, but something did, something faded out of existence and I can’t quite pinpoint the moment it went, but I feel its absence now. And it wasn't even a big dramatic thing, it was just walking, but then I started thinking about Sophie and how she always wanted to move to Melbourne and how I almost went with her and we had it all planned out, the little apartment, the late-night talks, the weird art galleries and I remember her laugh and the way she’d tilt her head when she was thinking and I just… I can’t shake the feeling that I made a definitive error, a categorical misjudgment of what my life should be and now I'm here, pushing a stroller, watching the same trees, living this quiet suburban existence that I objectively *chose* but sometimes feels like a sentence. And it’s not that I don’t love my kid, I do, and my wife, of course, I do, but there’s this hum underneath everything, this constant low thrum of… dissatisfaction, I guess, or maybe a better word would be a pervasive sense of incongruity between the life I’m living and the person I feel I am and I just don’t understand why I keep getting these flashes of what-if scenarios, these alternate timelines where I’m living a completely different existence, chasing something utterly unlike this and it’s not fair to anyone, least of all me, because I’m supposed to be happy and fulfilled and this is what everyone wants, right? The house, the family, the stable job, the quiet suburb, the low-stakes problems and I have all of that and yet I feel this cavernous void sometimes, this deep, almost clinical sensation of being misplaced, like a puzzle piece forced into the wrong spot and it just creates this tension, this low-level irritation that I can’t express and can’t alleviate. I just keep seeing her face, Sophie's face, and the way the light would catch her hair and the sound of her voice describing the cafes she'd found online and the way she talked about opportunity and freedom and I remember feeling so alive when I was with her, like anything was possible and now… now I just feel tired and responsible and obligated and I know that sounds awful and ungrateful and maybe it is, but it’s how I feel and I can’t shut it off and I keep wondering if I just… if I just missed my turn, if I took the wrong exit and now I’m stuck on this freeway, watching other people drive past on the road I was meant to be on and I don't know how to get off and I don't know if there even IS an off-ramp anymore. I just feel this immense sadness sometimes, for a life that never existed and for a version of myself that I never got to meet and it’s consuming and it's exhausting and I just want it to stop.