I was pushing the stroller earlier, just around our quiet cul-de-sac, the same one every day, and I had this... projection. This fully formed alternate reality, playing out like a high-definition film in my head. It wasn't a fantasy in the escapist sense, not really. More like a diagnostic tool, I think. An interrogation of the self. I was picturing her, my first love, specifically her laugh – the way it used to crinkle her eyes. And I was imagining if I'd followed her to Berlin, like we talked about, like she actually DID. What would I be doing now? Would I be teaching English to adults? Would I have started that small press? The details were so vivid, the smell of damp cobblestones, the taste of bad coffee from a street vendor. And the thing is, in that projection, I felt... lighter. Unburdened. Not HAPPY, necessarily, but more aligned. More ME. And then I looked down at the tiny, sleeping face in the stroller, and the weight of that dissonance just CRUSHED me. It's a strange form of cognitive dissonance, I think, to hold two such complete realities in your mind simultaneously. One where you are undeniably where you are supposed to be – with your family, fulfilling your presumed role – and another where a significant portion of your intrinsic self is thriving in a wholly different context. Is it a failure of CHARACTER to even conceptualize this? To feel this profound sense of... misplacement? I feel a guilt so pervasive it's almost physical. Like a damp cloak I can't shake off. Because I LOVE my child. I do. This isn't about regret for HAVING him. It's about a fundamental question of identity. Who am I, when stripped of the external markers of father, husband, provider (even if 'provider' now means keeping tiny humans alive and fed)? Who was I before this? And did I irrevocably lose that person? The terrifying part is that I don't know if that alternate me, the Berlin me, is even attainable anymore. It feels like a parallel universe that branched off and is now too far away to ever reconnect with. And what does that mean for this version of me? Am I just... stuck? Is this a form of melancholia, or something more pathological? I try to rationalize it – that this is just the exhaustion of being a stay-at-home parent, the lack of intellectual stimulation, the isolation. But it feels deeper than that. It feels like a betrayal of something essential within myself. And I don't know how to articulate it to anyone without sounding like an ungrateful, self-absorbed monster. So I push the stroller, and I walk, and I just… exist within this strange, quiet suburb, haunted by the ghost of a self I never became.