You know that feeling when you're looking at your own reflection in a dark window at 2am and you sort of don't recognize the shape of your own jaw anymore? I'm sitting here in my office—the big one I thought I wanted—and everything just feels... cold. Like I'm sitting inside a refrigerator. I'm staring at these boxes of files from thirty years ago and I can almost smell the cheap polyester of my first suit. It was a charcoal gray thing that sort of crinkled when I moved, like I was wrapped in aluminum foil. I thought I was something special back then. I thought if I didn't make people flinch when I walked into the room, I wasn't really doing my job. Sometimes you just get it into your head that being a man—especially a lawyer from where I came from—means you have to be a hammer. My old man worked at the mill until his lungs turned to dust, and he always said if you aren't the one swinging, you're the one getting hit. So I swung. I used to go into those depositions and just... bark. I'd lean over the table until I could see the sweat beads on some poor clerk's upper lip. I thought that tightness in my chest was power, but I guess it was just my heart trying to find a way out of a room it didn't like. There was this one woman, a court reporter named Clara. She had these tiny glasses that always slid down her nose and she smelled like peppermint. I remember SCREAMING at her because the transcript wasn't ready. Just red-faced, veins popping, making a scene in front of the whole hallway. She didn't even yell back. She just sort of looked at me like I was a broken radiator, just leaking heat and making a lot of noise for no reason. I felt like a king right then. I felt like I was finally worth the paycheck I was desperately trying to earn so I didn't end up like my father. But looking back, I was just a small man in a cheap suit making a kind person feel like dirt. You ever feel like you built a whole house out of the wrong kind of wood? That's what this career feels like now. I'm getting ready to pack it all in, maybe sell the house and move somewhere quiet, but the air in here just feels... heavy. Like I've spent forty years breathing in lead paint. I see the young associates now, the ones who act just like I did, and I want to grab them by the shoulders and tell them it doesn't make the money spend any better. Being the loudest dog in the yard just means you end up with a sore throat and nobody wants to pet you. I guess I'm just wondering where all that fire went. It didn't cook anything. It just burned the kitchen down. I look at my hands on the desk and they look like my dad's did—rough and sort of shaky—and I realize I spent my whole life being mean to people just to prove I wasn't scared of being poor. And now I'm not poor, I suppose, but I'm sitting here in the dark and the silence is so LOUD it almost hurts my ears. Maybe I should have just been a person instead of a lawyer. You know? Sometimes you just wish you could go back and tell that kid in the crinkly suit to just... sit down and shut up. But the clock just keeps ticking.