There is a family dinner, somewhere in your forties, that you cannot eat.

Not in the no-appetite sense. In the sense that you lift food to your mouth and the muscles in your jaw will not finish the motion. You drink water. You drink wine. You praise the food, loudly, and push it around. The plate, by the time the rest of the table is clearing, has nearly the same arrangement of food it had started with, with two craters where you have moved things around to look as though you have eaten.

There is nothing wrong with anything in the room. There is a great deal right with it. The conversation is the conversation conversations at this table have always been. Someone asks when you are coming home. Someone asks when you are getting married. Someone asks what your work actually is. You answer in a voice you recognize, in real time, as a voice you have developed for these questions specifically. It is not a lying voice. It is the voice of a person who has been answering correctly for so long that the correct answers come faster than thinking.

There is a moment, at certain tables, when the story you are telling about your life stops convincing the person telling it.

Most of the time the moment passes. You turn back to your wine, your phone, the next question; the story re-glues itself; the dinner ends; you sleep. The reason I remember a particular dinner, a particular plate I could not eat at, a particular look from someone across the table who knew, is that for the first time the story did not re-glue.

That was the night I opened a file on my laptop and called it `notes.md`, because I did not want to call it anything more honest than that. I did not know I was typing toward a book. I would not know that for another decade. The file was just a place to put the sentence that would not let me sleep. The sentence was: I think something is wrong.

You will recognize the sentence. You may have already typed it.

I will let you read it again, later, in a different room.