Pessimism might be an insurance policy against disappointment, and optimism a total buying into a different fantasy, but maybe a love of fate could be both and neither, I thought; then the agent at the airport confessed that the problem with my ticket was that it had been recategorized as first class for no understandable reason, and she couldn’t find a way to change it back to the economy ticket I had purchased, hard as she tried.

The flight was long and international, and I felt quite chewed up by the last two months, and perhaps I never needed more than I needed then the ability to fully recline for a few hours. Certainly many people would have liked to have met that first-class fate, and now the idea of getting an amor fati tattoo seemed quite silly, me of all people. What did I know about the difficulty of fate? Nothing.

It was all so odd. In a coffee shop in the terminal a child knocked her plastic cup of yogurt off the table, and looking at it splattered across the floor she was quiet for a moment, then laughed.