“Careful what you wish for, right?” Oli says.


    “Yeah,” Lark agrees. “But maybe I’m just not the best at foresight. Near-sighted third eye.”


    Oli smiles at this, but Lark does regret his poor predictive abilities. He didn’t think of himself as an impulsive person; he was generally fearful, risk-averse. It took him, if anything, too long to make decisions. The truth, though, was that he made up his mind in bursts of decisiveness after long periods of unresolved, anxious ambivalence. He weighed up choices and made plans, but usually with too much information and no sense of what they would feel like.


    Before he moved to Portland, he looked at rainfall tables and gas prices, apartments to rent, lists of the nicest parks, day trips to take, and venues he could visit. He promptly forgot these facts and statistics. Portland, for him, was a sensory smudge of gray skies, the chipboard walls of practice studios, good coffee, shivering in his damp room, the sun filling up Quinn’s kitchen. Liminal. It never became his home.


    If he’d been honest with himself, he would have expected that, could have known he would always be trying to leave. Maybe he could have told Max, too, and they both could have made better decisions about their futures.


    Lark is almost relieved that he didn’t have to choose between two conservatories. He doubts he would have made the decision based on anything other than rank tables, but only after months of fretful waffling about the different styles of the piano tutors.


    “It’s hard to predict anything,” Oli says. “We do a lot of guesswork.”


    Lark knows this is true, but he also appreciates that his poor sense of what the important facts are only make his guesses worse.


    When he extricated himself from his friends in Portland, he didn’t quite realize the effect it would have on him. He still thinks of Dana becoming fretful after he announced his departure, holds the guilt and worry close. She told him that she did not want to be alone with Max, burnt sage in their living room to dispel the negative energy left behind by their arguments.


    She was better off putting her faith in rituals than in Lark. He didn’t know what to do to help her. Even his own hopes were obscure to him; he could not see what was best for anyone else.


    <hr>


    This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.