You know that feeling when you’re supposed to be "on"? Like you’ve finally managed to put on the real clothes and the expensive perfume, but you just feel like a ghost wearing a human suit. We spend our lives pretending we’re these solid, defined things, but really we’re just a collection of memories we can’t let go of. It’s stupid, I know. This is stupid but I’m sitting across from a man who is genuinely kind—the father of my kids, the guy who sees me at 4am covered in spit-up—and all I can think about is the version of me that didn’t exist for him. The me that lived in a different timeline. Humans are so weird about the past; we treat it like a place we can actually go back to if we just look at enough evidence. I told him I needed to fix my lipstick.