You know, sometimes you just look back at a moment, decades later maybe, and it’s like a little film reel playing in your head, so vivid you can almost smell the cheap ramen or whatever it was you were eating that night, and you realize – oh, *that* was the fulcrum, the precise point where things tipped, irrevocably. And you want to reach back, just grab your younger self by the shoulders, really shake them, and say DON’T. Just… don’t do it. But you can’t, can you? Because that’s not how time works, not really. I keep thinking about this young couple I saw in the grocery store the other day, you know the type, all hopeful and a little bewildered, probably just moved into their first tiny place, and it took me right back to when we had our own little studio, practically a closet with a hot plate. And I remember how my husband, bless his heart, he’d agreed to let his parents stay for a MONTH. A whole MONTH. In our studio. Because his mother, she was always so… histrionic, I guess is the word, really prone to these dramatic pronouncements of feeling disrespected or unloved if you didn’t bend over backwards. It was a kind of emotional blackmail, really, a covert sort of manipulation, you know? And he just wanted to keep the peace, which I understood, I really did, because nobody wants that family drama, especially not when you’re just starting out and everything feels so precarious anyway, like you’re walking on eggshells even when nobody’s actually yelling. But it was like, he was trying to protect me, in a way, from *her*, but by letting her in, he was sort of… sacrificing my comfort, my peace, our actual physical space. And I remember my wife, she just kept saying, ‘It’s fine, really, we’ll make it work,’ but her eyes, they were just… resigned, like a little flicker of the light had gone out. And I watched it happen, you know? The slow erosion of her calm, her ability to just *be* in her own home. And it just makes you wonder, all these years later, what was the real cost of that “peace”? Was it worth it, really? Or was it just a deferral, a kind of payment in installments for a debt that was never truly settled anyway? You never really get that back, do you, that feeling of just being utterly, completely at home, unburdened. It’s a fragile thing, I guess.