There is an evening, somewhere in your twenties, when you are settled.

Not satisfied, satisfaction is several years away on the timeline you have drawn. Settled. The next step is specific and on schedule. The boxes are checking themselves in roughly the order they are supposed to. You sit somewhere, a balcony, a stoop, a window, and you think, quite literally, I have figured this out.

Twenty-something-year-olds are very confident about figuring things out. That confidence is, in retrospect, the only part of being twenty-something I miss.

The map was working. That was the whole problem. It was producing the outputs the map had promised. The degree was finishing on schedule. The job offer was real. The apartment was real. There was no stranger about to walk up the stairs, no envelope of bad news on the way. The bruise-colored sky over the city was just a nice sky.

What you do not yet understand, what some of you will not understand for another twenty years, is that having every output the map promises is not the same as wanting the place the map drops you off.

I want to say something honest while we still have time.

The version of you on that balcony, with the cheap red wine in a coffee mug and the next step on the kitchen counter, did not know that he was the prologue. He thought he was Chapter Twelve.

That is what the before is. The before is the part of your life that was already a book, except that you were inside it instead of writing it.

I want you to remember the bruise-colored sky.

I am going to need you to remember it, later.