You know sometimes you’re just rummaging through a box, a whole life of boxes really, trying to find some old tax receipts or maybe a photo from that trip to Seville and you pull out something completely unexpected, something that just punches you in the gut, but gently, like a ghost really and it’s not even a big deal, not really, but it makes you stop everything and just sit there staring at it, and for me it was this stupid old postcard, dog-eared and faded, from a place called Seabrook, Washington, and it had a lighthouse on it, a really dramatic one, all craggy cliffs and crashing waves and it was from David. And it wasn’t just any postcard, it was *the* postcard, the one he sent after he’d moved out there, after we’d had that whole drawn-out conversation about his dreams of opening a small bookstore and maybe doing some woodworking on the side, and me, always practical, always tied to my job at the public library, always believing in the inherent stability of a good pension, and I remember him saying, “Just come, Margaret. What’s holding you? You love the ocean. We could just… be.” And I remember thinking, “Be what, David? Broke? Without health insurance?” And now, looking at this postcard, with his looping handwriting, "Still waiting for you. The sunsets here are… everything," and it's over fifty years later, and I'm 76, and my life has been, by most metrics, a success. But you know that feeling when you just get caught in a loop, a sort of cognitive rumination, where you just keep playing out the alternate realities, the roads not taken, and it’s not even that I regret my life, not really, I have my beautiful apartment overlooking the park, and my wonderfully fulfilling volunteer work, and my diverse group of friends, all of us discussing geopolitics and the price of avocados, but then I look at this postcard, and I think about that little coastal town, and him, and what might have been, and what kind of Margaret would *she* have been? Would she have been happier? More… at peace? Or would she have been bored out of her mind, longing for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a decent espresso? It’s stupid, really, this sudden acute pang of what feels like an anachronistic sorrow, a kind of delayed-onset grief for a life I never had, and it’s not a full-blown depressive episode, no, not at my age, you learn to differentiate between a fleeting melancholic affect and a clinical presentation, but it’s still there, this quiet hum of what if, just under the surface, like a latent viral infection that flares up unexpectedly, and you just wonder, was that the moment? Was that the crucial decision point, the pivot that sent me down this particular, very urban, very full, but sometimes, just sometimes, very lonely path? And you’re just sitting there, the city humming outside your window, and you’re looking at a lighthouse on a faded piece of cardstock, and you’re just… wondering.