I'm looking at these papers, these introductory biology papers, every single day, every day, the same predictable misunderstandings of mitosis and meiosis, and my fingers ache. Not from the carpel tunnel they diagnose you with at this age, not that kind of ache. It's a phantom ache, a ghost limb of a different life. My father's hands, they were thick and calloused, always smelling faintly of sawdust and turpentine. He built things, real things. Cabinets, porches, the sturdy kind of furniture that outlasts generations. My hands, they are thin, professor's hands, good for holding a pen, for pointing at diagrams of cellular respiration, for delicately dissecting a frog that's already dead. He always wanted me to join him, after high school. 'You got a good eye, son,' he'd say, watching me sketch out a design for a birdhouse. He saw the way I measured twice, cut once, the satisfaction I took in the grain of the wood, in the satisfying thud of hammer meeting nail. But my mother, she saw the paycheck-to-paycheck reality, the splinters and the backaches, the way the shop slowed down in winter. She saw a better path, a cleaner path. So I went to college, studied biology, became a professor. A good living, a respectable living, she’d remind me, every single time I visited home. And it is. It really is. But sometimes, especially now, grading these endless piles, I close my eyes and I can feel the weight of a hammer in my hand, the satisfying resistance of a block of oak. I can almost smell the wood chips, sharp and clean, not this stale air of the lecture hall. It's a dull ache, a deep thrumming beneath the skin, for something tangible, something built with my own two hands that you can feel, that you can lean on, that will stand firm for years and years after I’m gone. It's a peculiar kind of melancholia, this longing for a life not lived, a skill not honed. These papers, they just feel so... insubstantial. Like tracing outlines in the sand, knowing the tide will come and erase them all.