EPILOGUE: The Receipt

EPILOGUE

 The Receipt

Somewhere tonight, a person who read all three parts is lying in bed with the light off, feeling something. Not inspiration—that burned off an hour ago. Something quieter. Something with teeth.

It is the feeling of having been accurately described by someone who has never met you.

• • •

He is thinking about the gym membership he pays for and does not use. She is thinking about the conversation she has rehearsed forty times and delivered zero. He is thinking about the business plan that has been a business plan for three years and has never become a business. She is thinking about the marriage that is not bad enough to leave and not honest enough to save. He is thinking about the phone in his hand right now, at this hour, performing its nightly duty as a sedative.

Each of them recognizes the toll. Each of them knows, as of tonight, exactly which pain they have been paying and which they have been avoiding. The math is no longer hidden. The invoice is no longer in a drawer. It is open on the table, itemized, and the total is legible.

• • •

Tomorrow morning, one of them will get up early. Not because he feels like it. Because he said he would, and the ledger is watching, and the gap between intention and action has become, as of tonight, intolerable.

The others will hit snooze.

They will mean to start Monday. They will feel the flicker again, briefly, over coffee. They will agree with the thesis one more time, in the abstract, the way a person agrees with the existence of gravity while stepping off a roof. Then the day will fill with noise, and the noise will do what noise always does—cover the signal. By evening, the sting will have faded. By the weekend, it will be a memory of a feeling they once had about something they once read. They will file it next to every other truth they recognized and declined to act on.

The drawer is getting full.

• • •

This is not a tragedy. Tragedies involve forces beyond a person’s control. This is something worse. This is a choice, made fresh every morning, to pay the cheaper pain or to let the expensive one compound for another day. It is the quiet, ordinary act of selecting comfort when you know—you know—that the comfort is borrowed and the interest is real.

Nobody will notice. That is the thing about avoidance. It is invisible until it isn’t. The body looks fine until the diagnosis. The finances look manageable until the emergency. The relationship looks functional until the silence becomes structural. The life looks acceptable until you are sixty-three years old and sitting in a room and the question arrives—not from anyone else, just from the quiet—and the question is: What did you do with it?

And you will know. You will know whether you paid or whether you hid. The answer will not be ambiguous. It never is, at the end. The stories we tell ourselves dissolve. The rationalizations lose their warmth. What remains is the record: what you did, what you built, what you endured on purpose, and what you avoided because it hurt.

• • •

The toll does not care about your reasons. It does not negotiate. It does not offer extensions, discounts, or forgiveness. It does not distinguish between the person who didn’t know and the person who knew and chose not to act. It collects the same from both. The only difference is that one of them is surprised.

You are no longer that person.

So. Morning is coming. The alarm will sound. The bed will be warm. The phone will be close. The old pattern will extend its hand like a friend who has never wished you well.

What will you do?

 • • •

 “The difference between success and failure is one’s willingness to accept pain.”

 END