It's a horrible cliche: middle-age woman in her second marriage and third career decides to pursue a particular path - an adult path, an "appropriate" path, certainly not the path she wanted but one she can "live with" - and she commits to said path.
And then everything breaks down. She overreacts to normal office politics and administrative ass-fuckery, she becomes withdrawn and uncommunicative, and in an impressive example of psychosomatic resistance she comes down with a stomach flu and ends up in bed for four days. She's not unhappy; she's miserable. She's trapped and depressed and starts to isolate and she thinks her life is a giant out-of-control lie.
Now here's where it starts to get... if not good, then at least better, more specific. Husband #2, being frighteningly adept at reading her sometimes mercurial moods, though she tries her best to hide these things, says to her "something feels off, I think we need to get the hell outta Dodge for a while." They plan a weekend trip. Several destinations are discussed but they decide on- correction: she decides on the town in which she felt most like herself, the last place she felt completely whole and (though she cringes at the term) "fully realized."
When they get there she is reminded of all of this, of how she felt the first time she spent any significant length of time in a community of like-minded people. Back then she felt, if not happy, then the absence of an overwhelming sadness that she had not noticed until it was missing. In the absence of this sadness she realized that she could never go back to it. She scrapped her old life and started a new one, a better one, a happier and more complete one. It was hard but it was good.
And now, in the present, she walks with Husband #2 to all the places she remembers herself. She goes to the locations of (unironic) Major Life-Changing Decisions. She sees signs of her past self, her real self, everywhere. Literal signs. It's awful and heavy-handed and part of her rolls her eyes at how obvious it all is. She is sad and desperate and wants to change her name and run from The Wrong Path. She falls apart. Husband #2, who calls her on her shit better than anyone she has ever known, who is not afraid of her anger or her tendency to withdraw, who tells her to knock that shit off because he's on to her and knows what's she's trying to do and she's not fooling him... tells her to start being honest with herself and him. So she is. And the world starts to feel right again.
She's not good at being honest with herself but she's much worse at trying to live a life that doesn't feel right. She is, quite frankly, awful at being an appropriate adult and doing appropriate adult things and would much rather spend her days thinking and writing about books and writing. She has always been this way; she prefers books to people. She prefers books to sleep, food, sex, drugs, children, husbands, breathing. She prefers books.
And now she feels like Bartleby and will call The Arbiters of The Wrong Path and tell them she'd rather not continue on that path but rather to pursue The Right Path. The Only Path. And she realizes, at last, that there was never really any question, the choice had already been made years ago. This is her One True Thing and she has grown tired of trying to make it be something else.
And while she feels foolish that she again tried to deny what is obvious to herself and to everyone else, she does take some small pleasure in the fact that hers was, perhaps, the most succinct and efficient midlife crisis in history. This small pleasure is of course diluted by the sudden bitter realization that she likely could have successfully angled for some kind of murdered-out souped-up V12 Hemi-powered muscle car in the process.
Fuck. Maybe I should try that again.
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