She can master any path

We are walking through the cold of night to pick up Amber's car, charging in town. She frets aloud when Marist will take her tuition money or, on that point, alert her that classes are going to begin.

"If they start in February, that means that they will go until June," she theorizes. "I can't do that. I've told my job that I could work more over the summer."

"They won't do that," I assure her. "The parents of the younger students wouldn't allow it, no matter what else has happened in the COVID Year. They have to end by mid-May."

She looks up at me as though she is aware that I have made a point, but it is not one she can process. "Why aren't they telling me?"

"I don't know."

"Maybe I will just skip this semester. It doesn't matter," she says. "Maybe I'll just drop out."

"Why would you do that?" Her schooling takes up a lot of her time and brain space, but this statement doesn't have the texture of an off-handed remark. She is not testing that waters as much as giving voice to something that had been building within her.

It is difficult to judge her emotional state, as she is wearing a floral mask.

"It will take me five years to finish at this rate," she says.

I did not know this. Given that Amber has two degrees already, she must have been able to skip a few prerequisites. And that is not factoring in how she persists in impressing her professors. All of them would go to bat for her that she doesn't need to dither about in 101 courses. "Yes, but then you will have a master's degree!" I joke.

"A bachelor's."

I furrow my brow. "Won't that help you in your career?"

"I already have the bachelor's degree," she reminds me. She received one in art as a traditional student, though that was a decade in her past. Beyond being a stepping stone to an eventual master's and a potential Doctorate, I had assumed a bachelor's in a hard science would open new doors. She is a vet tech, but I did not think that this was where she expected to be for long. She is restless by nature.

"What I have," she continues, "is an expensive hobby. One that costs $5000 a year."

Since she had become a vet tech, she has not asked for my financial support of her education, so I was ignorant of the exact price. $5000, while hefty, would be worth it if it were an investment that would pay dividends in her career. As a hobby that occupies most of her free time for one class a semester (though with a lab) while working more than part-time each week, I can see how she would feel uncertain.

Amber might have had a different fate. One day, while working maintaining the yard of a wealthy, absent family, she stepped in a deep hole that the owners had cunningly covered with a tarp. Amber was unable to work that job any longer, having brutally damaged her ankle, and was on some form of workman's comp for years while trying to get it fixed. During this time, she floated the idea of going to community college to get a vet tech certification.

If she had called out of work that day, if she had stepped three feet to the right or left of that hole, if anyone had alerted her that the tarp was a pitfall trap, she may not have decided to start this process. I cannot envision what she would be doing instead. Her job is the most lucrative she has ever had and, more than likely, the most meaningful. She would have found a different one on the path that was ripped from her, though I don't know what that might have been. She would not have worked for a garden store for the rest of her life. (Even then, she got that job because I biked past it and remembered it to her later. Suppose I didn't decide to bike that road. In that case, she never gets the job, never injures her ankle, never takes classes to become a vet tech, never gets her current position, never decides to go to Marist, and is not in the center of a minor existential crisis. Our nesting choices do not affect the outbreak of COVID, though, which plays some part in the issue at hand.)

My life has changed because of that badly sprained ankle, too. Amber decided to abandon cooking dinners, which turned out to be a chore I, of necessity, like doing. In fact, most things to do with the kitchen have fallen to me. I have had to learn to leave her alone when she is studying and expect less emotional labor in the relationship (which therapy made permissible). I have more time without her in the apartment, as she always was there if she were not visiting her mother. She doesn't have the liberty of weekend holidays. Our Fridays together are gone for the most part, as I work at 7:30am, and she usually does not get home until well after 8pm. If she works Saturday, this means that she must be in bed with an hour of arriving home to a small meal of chamomile lavender tea and two mozzarella sticks. She is exhausted until Sunday when I must press her to do nothing much outside the house. Even on those Saturdays where she is technically free, if classes are in session, she needs to prioritize studying over a social life; we can see friends in small windows, or Amber will be irritated and resentful.

She is on this path now, taking her classes, earning a perpetual 4.0, and being the unofficial TA when it comes to her classmates. Without the classes, she could work full-time. I am not sure that she would like to work full-time. The hours harry her already, but she would have that opportunity.

I cannot tell her what she should do. I have never had to work a job like hers while taking courses close to as rigorous; I do not think that I could handle living her life, even as I am an accessory to it.

This talk of quitting may be idle conjecture, just blowing off steam. I will support Amber no matter, as I have for years. She is driven, a perfectionist, a woman who prides herself on being a hundred-percenter in video games. I don't know if she has it in her to stop taking classes before she achieves a new degree. I do know that she is not always aware of how to slow down before life breaks her.

If Amber could promise herself that she would return to this dream--if she could be sure that this is a dream she still wants--taking this semester off would be a small indulgence. That she asks me feels as though I am meant to tell her to take no class this spring. Amber would not ask otherwise. She is only trying to find confidence and say it came from me.

The next time we speak on this--because, of course, it is not so quickly settled on a walk--I mention my theory that her current path was begun by her ankle. To my surprise, she agrees wholly. It almost is an answer in itself; how can she perseverate on a situation predicated on a sprain, no matter how debilitating it was? How can this injury be one of the most important things in her life?

She has not made her decision, but I see that she would rather not take a class. It is too much optional pain. Physics II is only another step, not close to an end. She might prefer to focus on working at her animal hospital. There is no shame in reevaluating one's priorities or taking a break from the pressure.

It barely needs saying that I will do all I can to help Amber achieve her dreams, this one in particular. I make enough to resume paying our expenses so she could go to school full-time to finish this degree, though she wants to build her career more organically. Amber is content being a vet tech. I do not think she aspires any longer to be a veterinarian, though I do not doubt that she would be superb at it. She is brilliant beyond question, well beyond what I suspected when I first fell in love with my fluffy Etsy artist. Her dreams are realistic if challenging. (I'm grateful that my aspirations only involve writing and publishing, things for which I do not need further schooling, only my own practice. If nothing else, being a novelist is cheaper.)

Whatever she chooses won't be the end of the road. She is incapable of being satisfied now that life has, for once, allowed her to taste success. I do not think her education to date is a sunk cost or only an expensive hobby. I doubt she entirely believes that either, but I understand the niggling doubt.

Her mental health concerns me. I do not know how she would handle the feeling that she had wasted her time, that she gave up when something became a struggle. She spent too long working toward goals but not being rewarded. She kept a stiff upper lip about it, but it wore on her every time she gave herself totally and was spurned. After her injury, she was so dejected that she left her tools behind in a field that had been her farm plot. She never returned for them, though I assume the farmers adopted them.

Amber is remarkably anxious in some situations, which might surprise people who only see her around me, in class, or at work--all venues where she has pillars of confidence on which she can lean when she feels unsteady. Outside that, social situations can be too much for her. She attributes this in part to being on the autism spectrum--no doctor has officially diagnosed her, but her research found that her symptoms match.

Even if she doesn't have a class this semester, her mind will not relax, I know. If she does not take this class, she will find another thing to swallow her time. She is repainting our apartment's bathroom. Though it needed it, it was more than she wanted a project. She has spent hundreds of dollars and tens of hours on it so far and has paint ready for our bedroom. She needs to keep herself busy, her reprieve mostly reading manga and playing videogames (which she does when she can; she isn't exhausting herself entirely). Postponing a class until the fall only means that she will devote that energy to something at least as consuming.

last watched: Over the Moon
reading: Piercing the Darkness