My supervisor noticed. He had watched me decline advancement opportunities and volunteer for tasks that made everyone else's lives easier without changing my title or salary. One afternoon he called me into his office and asked whether I would consider leading a small internal team for the next quarter. "You've got the technical side," he said, "but I need someone who can make a decision without asking for permission from everybody in the building."
The sentence stayed with me. I knew how to ask permission; I had been doing it for years, at home and at work, and I had called the habit being considerate. I told him I wanted to try. He gave me a list of expectations and a deadline for a proposal, then told me to stop apologizing every time I had an opinion in a meeting.
In the evenings I walked. At first I walked because the new apartment was too quiet, but gradually the walks became something I looked forward to. I found a park with a looping path, a small used bookstore, and a gym that offered a monthly membership I could actually afford. I signed up without asking anyone whether the timing was convenient.
The first time I went to the gym, I lasted twenty minutes on a treadmill and spent another ten minutes sitting in the locker room wondering why I had paid money to feel so tired. I went again two days later. It was not about getting a different body to show Sarah what she had lost, despite the way certain friends talked about breakups. I wanted to feel physically present in my own life again, and sweating through a workout gave me a kind of simple certainty I had been missing.
I began drawing at night. I had studied art in electives at college and used to keep sketchbooks before I became embarrassed by the time I spent on something with no obvious practical benefit. Sarah had once described my paintings as sweet little hobbies, and I had accepted the description even when it hurt. In the new apartment, I bought a cheap set of watercolors and spread them across the kitchen table after dinner.
My first attempts were terrible. The sky in one painting looked like dirty dishwater, and a tree I tried to draw resembled a broom with a medical condition. I sent my brother a photograph because I thought he would laugh, and he did. Then he asked if he could have it and said he knew exactly where he wanted to hang it.
I told him he had questionable taste. He answered that he had known that since agreeing to help move me at nine on a Sunday night. We laughed about it for longer than the joke deserved, and when the call ended I sat for a while with a feeling I had almost forgotten. Something could be good simply because I enjoyed doing it and because someone I cared about enjoyed it too.