I think maybe I’ve lived the wrong life... or maybe I just didn't have the courage to live the right one. It’s nearly 3 AM and the moon is hitting the hydrangeas just right, and I’m sitting here on my phone because I can’t sleep. I’m seventy-six now. That’s a long time to keep a quiet sort of grief tucked away in your chest. I spent thirty-seven years as a tax accountant. Thirty-seven years of Section 179 deductions and corporate audits and the gray, flat hum of fluorescent lights. I was good at it, I suppose. I had a certain... aptitude for the minutiae. But every time I look at my backyard, I feel this sharp, physical pang of—well, I think a clinician might call it anhedonia, or maybe just a profound sense of misplaced labor. I remember this one afternoon specifically. I was fifty-eight. It was tax season, of course, and I was sitting in my home office with a stack of spreadsheets for a mid-sized construction firm that was trying to hide their losses in equipment depreciation. The blue light from the monitor was making my eyes itch. I looked out the window and saw the way the light was hitting the slope of the hill behind our house. I started thinking about drainage. I started thinking about how a stone retaining wall could create a series of terrace gardens... I could see the English Yew, the creeping phlox, the way the colors would bleed into each other like a watercolor. I spent four hours sketching a site plan on the back of a corporate tax return. I felt... ALIVE. Then I looked at the clock and realized I was four hours behind on my billable time and I just started crying. Quietly, so my wife wouldn't hear. I don't know if this counts as a confession but I think I’ve been a fraud for half a century. My parents were "starving artists" in the literal sense—we didn't have heat in the winter sometimes—so I ran toward the most boring, stable thing I could find. I chose the ledger because I was afraid of the hunger. But looking back, I think the hunger I have now is much worse. It’s a sort of... spiritual malnutrition. I see a beautiful park and I don’t just enjoy it, I take it apart. I see the grade of the land, the botanical groupings, the structural integrity of the hardscaping. I could have designed spaces that made people feel something. Instead, I helped wealthy men keep an extra 2% of their capital gains. My wife, she thinks I’m just a "hobbyist" in the garden. She tells the neighbors, "Oh, Arthur loves his little plants," like it’s some cute geriatric pastime. She doesn't realize that every time I prune the azaleas, I’m mourning. I think she might have married a version of me that I invented to survive. If I had told her back then that I wanted to leave the firm and start a landscape design business, we probably would have lost the house. We had three kids in college. The risk-reward ratio was... well, it was untenable. I did the math. I’m an accountant, so I always do the math. And the math said: STAY IN THE CUBICLE. Sometimes I wonder if there’s a name for this. A specific diagnostic term for when you realize you’ve reached the end of the book and you realized you spent the whole time reading the wrong title. I feel a lot of... I suppose it's resentment? Not toward her, but toward myself. My hands are too shaky now to do the real work. My back can't handle the digging. I have all this specialized knowledge about soil pH and ornamental grasses and Japanese maples, and it’s all just... rotting inside me. It’s like having a library full of books in a language no one else speaks. I remember I tried to talk to my son about it once. He’s a lawyer. I tried to tell him that the "safe" path feels like a slow-motion car crash once you get to seventy. He just looked at me with this pitying expression and said I was probably just "tired" and needed a vacation. They don't want to hear that the man who paid for their private schools and their weddings was actually dying of boredom every single Tuesday at 2 PM. It would make them feel guilty, I think. Or maybe they just can't imagine me as anything other than the man with the calculator. I keep thinking about this one client I had. A young man, barely thirty, who was making a mess of his taxes because he was spending all his money on this wild, experimental sculpture garden in the desert. I should have told him to be careful. I should have told him to get a "real" job. But I just sat there looking at his receipts for ton of river rock and rusted steel and I felt so jealous I thought I was going to be sick. I didn't even charge him for the full hour. I just wanted to hear him talk about the way the wind moved through the metal. It's 3:30 now. I can hear the house settling. It’s a good house. A "successful" house. But I think maybe I’d rather be sleeping in a shack if I could have spent my days working with the earth instead of the IRS. I don't know why I’m typing this. Maybe I just need to say it once before I’m gone... that I wasn't really an accountant. I was a gardener who got lost in the numbers and never found his way out. I’m just so tired of being the "reliable" one. I’m so TIRED. I don't think I'll ever tell them. It’s too late for the truth to do anything but hurt them. So I’ll just get up tomorrow and I’ll go out and I’ll deadhead the roses and I’ll pretend that this little plot of land is enough to make up for the thousands of acres I never got to touch. I suppose that’s just the way it goes. You make your choices and then the choices make you... and then you’re just an old man in a chair, wondering where the time went. It’s just... it’s a very quiet way to break your own heart. I think I might try to close my eyes now. Maybe I'll dream about the stone walls I never built. Probably not, though. Probably just spreadsheets.