I’m staring at this glossy brochure for the Galápagos, you know? Penguins, giant tortoises. A whole… ecosystem of things that don’t judge your sprint velocity. It’s raining outside. Always raining here in this gray northern city. My single pane window rattles. My gig economy laptop, well, it’s seen better days. I’m 76. Seventy-bloody-six, and I’m still pitching for freelance dev work like I’m fresh out of a bootcamp. The irony. It’s a dark sort of funny, isn’t it? I laugh. A little wheezy puff. No one around to hear it anyway. There was this girl. Ingrid. God, her name even sounds like sunshine. We were young, back in… must have been ’72? She was doing some kind of field biology, always smelling of salt and sunscreen. We met at a conference, some dry academic thing I was forced to attend for my junior dev role. My role then was to make sure the punch cards didn't jam. Riveting. She was talking about migrating patterns of some obscure sea bird. I was… captivated. Not by the bird, bless its feathery heart, but by *her*. Her eyes, the way she animatedly gestured with a pen. We talked for hours that night. About everything and nothing. She was off to Ecuador in six months for a research grant. To the Galápagos. And she said – I can still hear her voice, slightly accented, like music – “Come with me. You could build systems for the research. There’s a whole new world out there for a mind like yours.” She wasn’t wrong. I *could* have. I was good with systems. Always have been. My mind, even now, tends to categorize, to diagnose the logical flaws in things. I could’ve built something magnificent, something meaningful, out there in the heat and the salt. But I didn’t. I remember the exact moment. My boss at the time, a real piece of work, found out I was even thinking about it. “You have a pension plan here, Albert. A *stable* future. Don’t throw it away for some… flight of fancy.” He called it that. A flight of fancy. And I listened. My internal locus of control, utterly EXTERNALIZED by fear. My parents, bless their cautious hearts, had always preached stability. Always. I saw the pension, the modest but predictable trajectory. The known. And I chose it. I chose the known. She left. Ingrid. I got a postcard a year later, a blurry photo of a frigatebird. Just her signature. No message. I never replied. What was there to say? “Sorry, I traded your wild, beautiful life for a 401k and a desk with beige linoleum?” My life here… it wasn’t bad. Comfortable. Predictable. Even had a wife, two kids. A good run. But looking at this brochure, at the blue-footed booby with its ridiculous feet, I just… I wonder what kind of systems I’d have built. What kind of person I’d be. Would I have her laugh lines around my eyes, instead of these… these etched furrows of screen fatigue? The rain is really coming down now. My landlord will be hounding me about rent for this shoebox apartment. Another freelance pitch to write. Always another pitch. I should really toss this brochure. It’s just… a paper ghost of a life unlived. A gentle ache. A reminder that sometimes, the most logical choice isn’t the *right* one. And now, at 76, my “stable future” is a series of short-term contracts and the constant low-grade anxiety of a late invoice. Funny, that. Really bloody funny.