Character.

Good posture had always been important to him, the sort of posture most boys his age didn’t bother with. A full beard covered his youthful face, making it harder to pin him down in age, but his shoes — often Toms, the au courant signifiers of hipness, often in bright colors — suggested something of youth, a spot of nonconformity in an otherwise rule-abiding life. It was this that had initially attracted his ex-wife to him; it was also what pushed her away two years into the marriage — when she realized that a whole life couldn’t be built around only spots of interest and spontaneity. Having lived her own life within the lines, a bit of the subversive lived inside her. A career and robust coffers gave her an out, a chance she tried to take. For three months, she was able to pretend that she was chasing a dream.

Aspirations — from the Latin aspirare, from ad- ‘to’ + spirare ‘breathe.’

She would fail, this was obvious from the beginning — don’t bother with words like fate or destiny; this wasn’t inevitable, it was merely the only option. If she’d known more about what it was she was trying, this is information she would’ve had before she quit her job and tried to make a go of it, before she eschewed the identity of her previous ten years and tried to make a new one modeled on a concept she misunderstood. Not having a corporate job, not wearing a suit, at first felt like freedoms, decisions she had made about her life on her own. But, would you believe it, in a few weeks it no longer felt like a privilege. Sweatpants may have been comfortable, but, where on the first day she wore them while sitting at the kitchen table, back straight and lips curled in a perma-smile, twelve weeks later she had lowered her standards on the sniff test and in unwashed, coffee splashed sweats she was still in bed at noon.