What I Keep

I met her at a time when my life had begun to narrow in certain ways and open in others. I am thirty-eight now, and there are small betrayals in the body that do not announce themselves loudly, only persist. Recovery takes longer. Energy is something to be managed, not assumed. I notice these things without drama. They are facts, like weather.

What has come in their place is a kind of steadiness. I have a home now, if not large, then full. Books that I have chosen. Instruments that have known my hands. Languages that pass through the rooms like quiet visitors. There is food downstairs when I want it, and the city beyond that, and beyond the city, a world that has not closed itself to me. I can still move through it, if I am careful.

There was a time when I believed that life would be decided in a few grand turns, that something decisive would arrive and settle everything. That has not happened. Instead, life has arranged itself in smaller permissions. To wake up without dread. To work honestly. To keep the body in order. To go for a run, to teach, to help where I can. These things accumulate. They do not announce their importance, but they hold it.

I have spent years looking backward, trying to account for what was done to me and what I allowed. My mother’s absence remains a quiet fact, and my father’s life stands as a kind of warning more than an inheritance. There is no clarity to be gained by circling those things indefinitely. They do not resolve under scrutiny. They only repeat.

So I have begun, not to forget, but to place them behind me in a way that does not require constant attention. The future, such as it is, asks for something simpler. To remain grounded. To spend carefully. To speak plainly in business and in life. Not to be carried away by appetite or by resentment. To know the limits of the body and to respect them.

There is a life available to me that is not dramatic, but it is good. It is made of ordinary acts done with some consistency. It is made of restraint where I once had excess, and of attention where I once had distraction. It is not the life I imagined when I was younger, but it is one I can live without regret, if I do not waste it.

I understand now that peace is not something that arrives. It is something maintained. It requires a certain discipline, a refusal to be pulled back into what has already taken enough. There is no virtue in repeating what damaged you, even if it feels familiar.

I would like to live the rest of my life in this way. Not perfectly, but deliberately. To take what is in front of me, to care for it, and not to abandon it for illusions about what might have been. There is enough here. There is more than enough.