On the surface, my life is enviable. I wake in a house that responds to me like a well-trained body: blinds lifting at the exact hour, the hum of a heating system bringing the air to a practiced warmth. Breakfast is measured with the care of a jeweler weighing stones, forty grams of oats, two eggs, a quarter of an avocado. The knife’s edge makes clean work of it. It is not obsession, I tell myself, but discipline. Everything has its portion, its place.

After breakfast I dress in the compression tights and thin jacket that mark me out as one of those middle-aged athletes who take themselves seriously. The skates come out of their bag, blades shining like surgical instruments. At the oval, the world drops away. The ice holds me, returns my weight with something that feels close to flight. I find a rhythm: legs pumping, lungs opening, the rush of air on my face. Younger men on e-bikes ride the perimeter and glance sideways when I keep pace with them. I do not gloat. I only feel, for those moments, what I imagine it must be like to step outside of age.

When I return, the house has not shifted. Screens wait for me. My accounts whisper their balances. I click once, twice, and a six-figure stream of income runs quietly in the background. I could stop working altogether. Yet I log into meetings, skim proposals, give advice to men and women fifteen years younger who look at me through their cameras with that mixture of deference and calculation. Work, now, is ballast. Without it the days might float away.

It is the evenings that betray me. After dinner, grilled salmon, brown rice, broccoli, all measured, I sit in the living room. The clock ticks. Outside, the city moves, but in here the only sound is the hum of the refrigerator and my own breathing. It is then that moments return, not as regrets exactly but as visitors who refuse to leave.

I remember the library at university. The stale air, the sound of pages turned in rows. A woman two seats away with her hair tied back, glasses perched low. We spoke once, twice, about the printer jamming or an exam date. There was a day when she glanced up, caught my eye, and for the smallest span of time it seemed the silence was an invitation. I smiled, looked back to my book. I never asked her name. The scene replays with the clarity of ice under a skate: the light on her cheek, the way her pencil hovered above her notes, the faint pause between us where another life could have begun.

Years later, on a flight to San Francisco, I sat next to a colleague. We shared the tiny screen on my laptop, watched a film that was not good enough to hold us. Her laughter spilled past the armrest, warm in the closed cabin air. At one point, her hand brushed mine and lingered a moment longer than accident required. I pulled my hand back gently, returned to the spreadsheet glowing on my screen. The presentation I finished that night was adequate. She left the company two years later. I do not know where she is now. But I remember her hand.

There was also the friend who asked me to move with him to another city. He was full of reckless certainty, a start-up barely out of the garage. “Come on,” he said. “We’ll build something, even if it breaks.” I shook my head. Too risky. I had a good track where I was, a solid salary, a path mapped cleanly ahead. Years later I saw his name in the business pages, his company swallowed by an acquisition that changed his life. That Christmas he sent me a card, a family photo tucked inside. He looked heavier, older, happy.

I carry these scenes the way a skater carries old falls in his knees: they do not cripple me, but I feel them in certain weathers. My present is enviable, money without strain, health without fragility, order without chaos. Yet in the evenings the old moments arrive, asking not for correction but for recognition.

Last week something happened. I was at the rink, lacing my skates, when a young couple came in. She held his arm loosely; he carried her bag without noticing. They laughed, too loud for the quiet space, but no one minded. They took to the ice clumsily, stumbling into each other, holding on, laughing again. I skated past them at speed, my technique cutting clean lines, their awkwardness a blur at the edge of my vision. But as I circled again, I slowed. I watched them cling to each other, faces red with cold and delight, and I felt something press into me harder than any weight session had.

Later, in the changing room, they sat near me. She rubbed warmth into her hands; he leaned close, murmuring something I couldn’t hear. I thought of the library, the flight, the friend waving from a train platform. All those paused moments, each one a door I never opened. I stared at the couple until I realized I was staring, and then I turned away, embarrassed.

That night, back home, the house was as ordered as ever. The meal measured. The blinds lowered themselves on time. Yet the quiet felt different. The couple’s laughter seemed to echo in it, like a bell still ringing after the tower has gone silent. I walked through the rooms, each one arranged with precision, each one empty. I stood by the window, looking out into the dark, and for a moment I felt what I had once felt in youth: that strange dizziness when the ground of life trembles, when you could step forward into possibility or step back into safety.

Only now the choice is gone. The dizziness remains, but the leap is no longer before me.

So yes, I am enviable. Wealth in the bank, a body honed to its edge, the freedom to choose my days. But sometimes, in the evenings, I feel the ghost of another life brushing past, a hand lingering longer than accident. And I know that what I carry is not failure but the haunting of possibilities, moments that trembled once before me, and which I, in my caution, let pass.

And so I skate, fast and disciplined, each lap a circle closing on itself. I eat my meals, I balance my books, I keep my body strong. But beneath it all runs the memory of that trembling, the hush before a step not taken. The knowledge that youth was the only true currency, and that once spent, it never returns.