I was at a gallery, technically for work — auditing their financials, which is exactly as riveting as it sounds. We’re talking spreadsheets, line items, the kind of meticulous cross-referencing that demands a certain type of mental discipline. It's what I do. It’s what I’ve been trained to do. And while I was, you know, doing that, I kept noticing the art. Not the famous pieces, just… the new ones. The ones by someone who might be, like, my age, or a few years older. And this really peculiar cognitive dissonance started to occur. I was looking at these paintings, these vibrant, sometimes chaotic, sometimes incredibly subtle statements, and a part of my brain just wouldn't let go of this singular hypothetical: what if that had been me? Not exhibiting there *now*, obviously, but what if I hadn’t… pivoted. What if that scholarship, the one for fine arts, hadn't been quietly allowed to lapse? It wasn't a feeling of regret, not precisely. More like a persistent, low-frequency hum of something almost… diagnostic. Like an internal system flag, indicating a potential anomaly. I was observing my own internal landscape as if it were a data set. There wasn't an emotional cascade, no sudden pang of loss or anything dramatic. Just this quiet, persistent inquiry: is this an instance of counterfactual thinking? A rumination on alternative life pathways, common in individuals approaching what society defines as mid-career? I mean, I *chose* this. The stability. The predictability. The ability to afford the house in the suburbs that makes the HOA happy and keeps up with Mrs. Henderson’s new landscaping. The whole system is predicated on these choices. And yet, there was this… emptiness. Not overwhelming, just a specific kind of absence. Like a limb that isn't there anymore, but the nerve endings still register something. The thought of picking up a brush again, even for recreation, feels almost performative now. Like it would be an attempt to recapture something that simply isn’t… relevant. It just feels so distant from my current operational parameters. It’s not sadness. It’s more like a logical incongruity. The person who almost did that, the person who made art, she feels like a character from a different narrative. And I just don't understand why, after all this time, the sight of someone else’s vibrant brushstrokes would trigger this particular internal monologue, this quiet, insistent WHISPER of a road not taken.