I gently embrace my past disappointments with care and insight, and I let them go.

Every disappointment contains a life that was going to happen and then did not. The job that would have led somewhere. The city you were nearly going to live in. The version of your thirties roughly sketched out at twenty-two.

Those unlived lives are owed something. Not a lecture about how it all worked out for the best — sometimes it plainly did not — but a proper admission that you wanted it and it went. Grieving something small sounds absurd until you try it and find the weight comes off. Most things get lighter once they have been said out loud.