It was a door I kept describing so I would not have to walk through it.

I have noticed that the phrase after the birthday had been doing a particular kind of work for me for longer than one birthday could account for.

There had been an after-the-holidays, and before that an after-the-move, and before that an after-things-settle-down, a whole receding horizon of afters, each one a reasonable-sounding reason to not yet ask the one question that might change everything.

I understand now that this is how a person stays inside an arrangement that is quietly costing them: not by deciding to stay, which would require noticing, but by perpetually deferring the moment of deciding to leave, until the deferral itself becomes the life.