By Now

He hadn’t thought such fierce rambling possible in the presence of yuzu cream cake—especially after she’d spent the whole afternoon anticipating its flavor profile. Yet here she was, monologuing about how she’d never known what she wanted to become.

“Maybe I’d hoped to be a writer when I was ten. But no, that wouldn’t be practical, would it?” Then she was off again, on to Shel Silverstein and picture books for adults. “I just thought that by twenty-seven, I’d be so much more.”

She swept her hair over her right shoulder. He’d watched her move it from one side to the other all night.

“More what?”

She looked at him as if he hadn’t been listening. She reminded him she’d never known—though she would at least like to be more competent with taxes. More diligent about weighing her checked luggage. On her last flight, she’d had to shed twenty pounds in less than five minutes. The agents had asked what kind of magic she’d worked.

He said she was being a bit dramatic.

“But don’t you see? These are all symptoms of a bigger problem.”

She launched into her fifth metaphor of the night: false epiphanies at midnight. “And do you know what’s left when the tide ebbs?” she asked. By now, he knew her ebbing tides meant daybreak. He shook his head.

“Sea foam.” Her hands were in the air. What was she gesticulating at—her potential?

He sat back. “Do you mean you’re disappointed?”

A pause. He swore he could see the cream sag.

“I think so.”

Finally.

Then she told him how, during her second bout of depression, she’d drawn this silly comic about a dandelion realizing it was a dandelion.

“Haven’t you done enough?” he asked.

“First of all, no. And even if yes, I’m still a dandelion, aren’t I?”

He said she wasn’t playing fair. Things had worked out. She’d finished courses. Taught some, too.

“But what actually counts?”

She said she’d also written poetry and overinterpreted all 1,594 texts from whatchamacallit. But what employer would care about a 6.1-month lyric episode?

“Still, it’s something.”

She slumped. Then she admitted that yes, it had mattered. Yes, she wasn’t the same. She just had a tendency to collapse entire seasons into nothing produced.

“But isn’t that how the world keeps score?” she asked.

He lit the candles on the cake.

“One wish,” he said. “I suggest you use it to stop shitting on your own becoming.”