I’m seventy-six years old now, sitting in a kitchen that smells like stale grease and old paper, but my mind is stuck in 1982. I was thirty-four. I had this black metal stroller with wheels that screeched like a wounded animal every time I hit a crack in the sidewalk. The suburb was too quiet, that kind of midday silence that feels like a heavy PRESSURE in your ears. I was pushing my son—he’s forty-five now, has his own mortgage and a back that hurts—but back then he was just a weight of warm milk and damp cloth. The sun was hitting the asphalt, making that shimmering heat haze that makes the world look liquid. I remember the smell of fresh-cut grass and laundry detergent. I was wearing my work boots, the steel toes dragging a little because the shift at the plant had ended at six AM and I hadn't slept yet. We had maybe fourteen dollars in the checking account and the radiator in the Chevy was leaking. My hands were stained with grease that wouldn't come out of the cuticles no matter how hard I scrubbed. It felt like my life was a SCRIPT already written by people who didn't know me. I was a husband, a father, a laborer. My identity was just a series of functions. Her name was Elena. She was different. She had this EMOTIONAL LABILITY—one moment she was a storm, the next she was glass. She wanted to go to Marseille, to live in a room where the walls were made of stone and the light was different. She had a ticket. I had a job application for the foundry and a mother who needed her heart pills. I think about the NEUROLOGICAL ECHO of that choice every single day. The way my pulse hits my throat when I see a map of France or even a picture of the sea. If I had gone, my hands wouldn't be scarred from a hydraulic press. I imagined us in a small room with shutters, the air smelling of salt instead of diesel and floor wax. A different kind of poverty, maybe, but a different kind of SOUL. Pushing that stroller through the quiet streets felt like pushing a heavy stone up a hill that never ended. My son was heavy. The responsibility was a physical COGNITIVE LOAD that I wasn't equipped for, though I did it. I did it all. I never missed a payment. I never missed a day of work. They talk about REPRESSION like it’s a box you put things in, but it’s more like a slow-acting poison in the groundwater. You don't notice it until the trees start dying. I looked at my boy's sleeping face in that stroller and felt this terrible, cold DISSOCIATION. I loved him, but he was the anchor keeping me from a sea I never got to sail. I was in a sort of FUGUE STATE right there on Maple Street, walking past the same yellow houses, wondering if Elena was looking at the Mediterranean while I was looking at a dandelion growing out of a crack in the curb. My wife—God rest her, she was a good woman—she met me at the door with a glass of water when I finally got home from that walk. She saw the look in my eyes and asked if I was getting a migraine. I said yes. It was easier to name a physical PATHOLOGY than to tell her I was grieving for a woman she didn't know existed. I had a PROPRIOCEPTIVE error where I couldn't quite feel where my body ended and the boredom began. I felt like I was disappearing into the siding of the house. Forty years of that. Paycheck to paycheck. Fixing the roof, fixing the car, fixing the same tired excuses for why we couldn't go anywhere or do anything. I’m an old man now and the regret isn't a sharp pain anymore. It's a DULL ache, like arthritis in the joints. You learn to walk around it. You learn to live with the phantom limb of the life you amputated for the sake of being 'responsible.' You do what you have to do until there's nothing left of you but the doing. I’m typing this on a screen that’s too small for my eyes at two in the morning because the INSOMNIA is a predictable byproduct of a life spent holding your breath. My hands are stiff, the joints swollen. It doesn't get better. You just get used to the density of the air. The stroller is long gone, the boy has his own life, and I’m still just a man who stayed. I’m still just a GHOST in a house I paid off thirty years ago. I wonder if she ever thinks of me, or if I'm just a shadow she left behind in a country she forgot.