I found a photo on my phone from two years ago — me at a café I used to work from on Fridays, laptop open, a cortado on the table, afternoon light coming through the window at that particular slant it gets in October. I don’t remember taking it. I don’t remember that Friday being anything other than ordinary.
But looking at it now I thought: I seemed okay. More than okay, actually. I seemed like someone who had made herself a nice afternoon and wasn’t waiting for it to mean anything. I’d been so convinced back then that I was in a holding pattern, that the real version of my life hadn’t started yet. The photo disagreed. It looked exactly like a life, already underway, already plenty.
Sometimes the evidence that you’re living well shows up later, in photos you forgot you took of ordinary Fridays you didn’t think to appreciate.