Present Tense

They went around the table, which was the tradition — had been, since their twenties, the thing they did at dinner when the conversation reached the right depth: what would you have done differently?

Helen had heard the question many times over forty years of friendship and she had a set of answers she kept ready — things she might have studied, places she might have moved, a version of herself she might have chosen before choosing the version she became. She reached for these answers automatically.

Then she heard herself saying something different.

"I think I'd have been more present," she said.

The table was quiet in the way that a table is quiet when something more specific than expected has been said.

She heard it herself as she said it — heard that it was the true thing, not the rehearsed answer. She had a good life. She was not sitting at this table at sixty-eight with the accumulated weight of roads not taken. She had taken roads. They had been good roads. The question was not about the roads.

The question was about who had been walking them.

She had been, for most of her adult life, competently occupied with the performance of being Helen — the version that was legible to the people around her, that met the expectations of her profession and her family and her social world without creating the friction that a less managed version would have created.

She had been, in this sense, very successful.

What she had begun to notice, in the last few years — not with anguish, but with the particular clarity that arrived in her sixties like a shift in the light — was how much of her own life she had witnessed rather than inhabited. The celebrations watched from a slight remove. The difficult moments managed before they could be felt. The ordinary Tuesday evenings spent composing the face she would wear for Wednesday rather than being inside the Tuesday.

Her children, who were now adults, had said once that she had always seemed calm. They meant it as a compliment. She had received it as a compliment. Now she thought: calm might have been the performance, and the performance might have cost me the rest.

This was not a tragedy. She wanted to be clear about that, at the table, though she didn't say it. Her life had been good. She had been loved. She had loved.

But there was a question she was sitting with, quietly, in the way you sit with questions that have no clean answers: how much of it had she actually been inside?

The table had moved on to someone else's answer. She listened, genuinely, which felt like practice.

She had decided, not dramatically but deliberately, that whatever time remained she would attempt to inhabit. Not perform. Not manage. Inhabit.

She did not know exactly what that meant yet. She was learning.

She thought sixty-eight was not too late.

She thought it might have been better to start younger.

She thought: but here is where I am.