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TWENTY-THREE

Alex’s skin prickles with goose bumps. She rereads the letter quickly and then, before she can lose confidence, she begins to type a response.

Dear Misgivings,

Regret can come in many forms.

Once she has committed, the words come fast. Everything else falls away and she disappears into a sort of trance. Alex is back in the same place she went to just a couple of weeks ago, sitting on her living room floor, writing the answers to the application in her sweatpants. As she writes, her eyes sting with tears. There is so much she wants to say to Misgivings. She becomes immersed in their problem, completely transfixed by the solution as it unspools before her on the screen. She watches the words land on the page as though by divine intervention. She thinks that this must be the feeling writers talk about, where something that almost feels outside of yourself takes over. The writing feels urgent and necessary, and as she nears the end of her response, she realizes that the advice is something she needs to hear too.

We can never get back time—it’s one of life’s biggest tragedies but also one of its greatest motivators. If things were not finite, there would be no need to ever evaluate what is most important to us. You thought you were being true to yourself by keeping your options open, but all that time you were living in fear. If you are not mindful, you can spend a whole lifetime weighing your options. Commitment to anything, let alone another person, takes bravery.

She sits back, her chair creaking, and drops her hands from her keyboard. Her body is stiff from spending so long in deep concentration. It’s amazing the way this feeling overtakes her when she writes. She spent so long in life not knowing that writing was so transportive. She is oddly calm now. She can tell she wrote it well. She looks over the letter, rereading it carefully and correcting any small typos she made in the rush to get it onto the page. Then attaches it to an email to Howard Demetri. She presses Send and sighs with relief.

When she finally looks up, the sky has cleared into a crystal blue after days of oppressive smog. The afternoon sun sparkles warmly in the glass of the skyscrapers. She glances at the Excelsior Building, remembering Tom. It wouldn’t be so terrible to go out and have a nice dinner, would it? She remembers the dimple in his cheek, the way he bobbed his head a bit when he asked her out. She feels like the letter she answered was trying to heal her as well. Maybe she just needs to be brave enough to trust her own message.

Before she can talk herself out of it, she picks up her phone and texts the number Tom gave her.

Dinner tonight? I’m suddenly free.

Immediately after she sends it her chest tightens anxiously. It is unlikely that he’ll be free last-minute anyway, she thinks, trying to distract herself by cleaning up her desk, sweeping aside the already- read letters, and straightening the others in their neat pile. But less than a minute later the screen of her phone lights up.

I’m up for it! Let me find us a reservation somewhere. 7pm?

As Alex looks down at the screen, she can’t tell if she’s thrilled or terrified. Probably a mixture of both.

Perfect!