By Now

He hadn’t thought such a digression possible in the presence of a yuzu cream cake, especially when she’d spent the entire afternoon anticipating its “flavor profile.” Yet here she was, monologuing about how she’d never known what she wanted to become.

“Maybe a writer,” she said. “But I was ten. It certainly wouldn’t have been practical.” Then she was on to something about Shel Silverstein and writing 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 already lost track of how many times it had migrated over dinner.

“More what?”

She gave him a look. Right. She’d said she’d never known.

Still, she had a list.

More competent with taxes, maybe.

More diligent about weighing her checked bag. She’d had to shed twenty pounds in four minutes on her last flight.

More tolerant of greasy hair. Once, she’d shampooed with laundry detergent—though she maintained that the circumstances had been exceptional.

He said she was being a tad dramatic.

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

She launched into her fourth metaphor of the evening: false epiphanies at midnight.

“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 anyway.

“Sea foam.”

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

He sat back. “Are you saying you’re disappointed?”

A long pause.

“I think so.”

He swore the cream sagged.

Already, she was on about a silly comic she’d drawn during her second bout of depression: a dandelion realizing it was a dandelion. The first was at fourteen. She’d spent it in an actual closet.

He nudged the cake toward her. “You’re doing fine.”

“First of all, no. And even if I were, I’d still be a dandelion, wouldn’t I?”

He told her she wasn’t playing fair. She’d finished courses. Taught some, too.

“But none of that matters. None of that counts.”

Then came the numbers: a 2.4-year lapse in judgment; a 6.1-month lyric episode; thirty-three mediocre poems, written and rewritten. “But what does any of it count for?”

“Still, it’s something,” he said.

She slumped.

“Yes, it mattered. Yes, I’m not the same.” She looked at him. “I just collapse entire seasons into nothing produced. But isn’t that how the world keeps score?”

He lit the candle on the cake.

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