I’m sitting here, it’s 2:17 AM, and I’m looking out at the yard — the one I spend every Saturday meticulously maintaining. The hydrangeas are finally perfect, the lawn precisely the shade of deep emerald that makes old man Henderson next door visibly seethe with envy. It’s what you do, right? You buy the house in the desirable zip code, you spend thirty years commuting into the city, you accumulate the markers of a successful life. And then, at some point, you retire, and the markers are all that’s left. The thought occurred to me, rather forcefully, this afternoon while I was deadheading the petunias: this is what I should have done. Not audited corporate spreadsheets, not spent decades deciphering the arcane intricacies of tax law, meticulously calculating depreciation schedules for entities I cared nothing about. I should have been outside, designing landscapes, getting my hands dirty, understanding the soil, the light, the way a certain shrub interacts with a specific brick facade. I remember the college brochures, the ones my father found so amusing — "Landscape Architecture? Is that even a real profession, David?" He pushed me towards accounting, towards stability, towards what he called a "respectable career." And I… I just went along with it. It was the sensible option, the one that guaranteed a certain standard of living. Now, looking at the moonlit rhododendrons, it’s not regret, not precisely. It’s more like a dispassionate assessment of a suboptimal outcome. I constructed a life that functions impeccably on paper, a life that elicits approving nods from the neighbors and polite inquiries about my golf handicap. But the internal experience… the internal experience feels like a perfectly manicured lawn that’s been subtly, irrevocably poisoned at the roots. And the really infuriating part is, I did it to myself. I picked the stability. I picked the prestige. I picked the comfort. And now I’m 68, the garden is immaculate, and I’m just… here.