I knocked on the red door. Not too loud. People were trying to work. I don't like noise when I work, and I imagine they don't either. From inside came an unintelligible growl that I interpreted to mean I should open the door, so I did. I stepped just inside, left my hand resting on the knob, and waited for Eddie to look up.
      Eddie's office looked like all the others, but there was an air of greatness about it all the same. Eddie was a powerful man, and he got that way by sitting in that office and making all the right decisions. I credit him with that much. But whether he'd lost it over the years or just didn't see how much more potential he had at his fingertips, I wasn't sure.
      "Anne," Eddie rumbled around a fat cigar. "Shut the door. Take a seat."
      Eddie and I were opposites. He was fat, and I was thin. He was old, and I was young. He had wispy gray hair around the ears and none on top. I had lots of hair, deep black, down to my shoulders. Our differences didn't stop with appearances. We disagreed on virtually everything. But we had one thing in common. It's why he hired me, and why I took the job. We both wanted to make a living selling art.
      I settled into the plush green chair opposite his hulking cherrywood desk, just visible somewhere inside the cloud of smoke, suppressed a cough, and waited for him to speak.
      "Anne," he said in that tone of voice he uses when he's eager to work himself into a lather but wants to start out easy. "You're friends with Emily, aren't you?"
      I nodded. "We share an apartment."
      Eddie grunted. He rummaged over his desk for a particular sheet of paper among many. Upon finding it he snatched it up with a greasy hand and held it aloft. In that instant he adopted the exact same pose and expression he'd struck in one of the pictures on the wall behind him, the one of him wearing outdoor gear -- a jacket, a cap, and a pair of hunting gloves, all in mismatched plaid -- only in that picture he was holding up a nineteen-inch mackerel instead of my best friend's heart and soul.
      He fumbled for his reading glasses. They were somewhere on his desk too. Well, I hadn't been sure at the time, but most things were. "Ah!" he interjected with enthusiasm as he settled them over his nose. Between their thick black rims and that fat cigar, I could barely see his face at all.
      He cleared his throat and in the flat monotonous voice he always used when he read anything, he recited the following:

      I heard a Fly buzz - when I died -
      The Stillness in the Room
      Was like the Stillness in the Air -
      Between the Heaves of Storm -

      The Eyes around - had wrung them dry -
      And Breaths were gathering firm
      For that last Onset - when the King
      Be witnessed - in the Room -

      I willed my Keepsakes - Signed away
      What portion of me be
      Assignable - and then it was
      There interposed a Fly -

      With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -
      Between the light - and me -
      And then the Windows failed - and then
      I could not see to see -

      As he finished he set the paper on his desk, removed his glasses, folded them neatly, and laid them aside. Then he looked at me, and even through the haze of smoke, now puffing out of his mouth in rapid bursts like he was a steam locomotive cresting a steep hill, I could see the gleam in his eye, the gleam that signalled he was now well and truly ready to embrace that lather I was talking about.
      He stood suddenly, stabbed a pudgy forefinger into Emily's poem like he was planting a tent stake, and shouted, "Now that -- that is a greeting card!"

*       *       *       *
      I should probably back up a little and tell you about Emily and me and our other friends. There are five of us. We all share an apartment across town. Poetry doesn't pay like it used to, but by sharing the bills we get by. We all work at the Ballpark Greeting Card Company. Their headquarters was converted from an old shopping mall. It sits on two hundred acres right in the middle of town, but you'd never know it. Trees surround the complex, blocking the view in and out. Most of the townies had forgotten it's there. Every morning we gather, sleepy-eyed, at the gates to the grounds and walk in together. The longest part of the walk is across the parking lot. It's enormous. Percy counted the spaces one day when he was stuck for inspiration. By his count, the parking lot could accommodate seven hundred and thirty-two cars, but nobody ever parked in it. Everybody walked to work.
      The building is gothic, with marble statues and spooky gargoyles poking out from around the array of humming air conditioning units and evenly spaced streetlights, which are always on and buzzing even in the daytime and crowding out the natural sunlight with their own artificial pallor.
      There are two front doors. One, way off to the left, leads to the manufacturing side of the building. No matter where you are on the grounds, or when, you can hear the machines chugging along, printing greeting cards by the thousand. I never noticed how they ship them out. Maybe there's a loading dock out back somewhere.
      My friends and I work in the other half and accordingly angled our approach for the other door. Who are they? Well, you've already heard about Emily. She's my best friend. We tell each other everything and do everything together, but I confess sometimes she can be a little much, and I have to make an excuse to be alone. But then I recharge, and she's there for me again when I do. We laugh a lot. The only times she makes me sad isn't her fault: boys pass me by to talk to her, and I can't help but feel a little jealous. It's that flashy blonde hair and the way she ties it into pigtails that gets them. She spent the last five years chewing on gum -- or, rather, pretending to. She doesn't like gum, only the occupational therapy, so she chomps away on nothing at all, and twirls her hair around her fingers, and she says these rituals awaken her inner artist. Sounds ludicrous to me, but right after she took up these habits she wrote a masterpiece about drinking booze that didn't exist, so what do I know?
      "What do you think?" Bobby One asked. He pointed to the other front door, the one to the manufacturing half. "Shall we go that way this time?"
      "Why do you always ask that?" Bobby Two sighed, not genuinely bothered but putting on a good show of it. "Every morning, same question."
      Bobby One only shrugged.
      Two of us are named Bobby. That's why we have to enumerate them. Bobby One moved into our apartment a half-hour before Bobby Two did, so Bobby One gets to be Bobby One, and Bobby Two has to be Bobby Two. You'd never mistake one for the other, even though with their lanky frames, sandy hair, and impish energy with which they carry themselves one might understandably mistake them as brothers. But Bobby One is a philosopher, and Bobby Two is a philanderer. Bobby One is a sweetheart. Bobby Two is a good boy in his own way, and a good friend, but our friendship is an arrangement of convenience rather than inclination.
      That only leaves Percy, and I've mentioned him already. Ah, Percy. In so many ways he is the best of us, but he broods and buries dark secrets inside himself. Emily thinks it's the mysteriousness that draws me to him, and that if he opened up I wouldn't find him so interesting anymore. Maybe she's right. But true or not, Percy is my inspiration. Most of the poetry I'd written in the last three years came about because I thought it might be what that troubled part of him, which he kept hidden so well, needed to hear.
      Upon entering the right front door of the Ballpark Greeting Card Company Headquarters, one is immediately faced with a panorama of cubicles with gray sidewalls. Other than a few glass-walled offices along the back wall, Eddie's among them, the cubicle farm comprises almost the whole of the creative half of the building. In the very center of it is an opening large enough for a small cafeteria, but to get there we have to walk through the illustrations department.
      Bobby Two, the most social of us, greeted his friends as we walked by. "Morning, Vinny!" he called to a one-eared man tucked inside a cubicle with his easel.
      Vinny, a short, chubby man with an underbite you'd never notice because it's impossible to tell where the bones of his jaw are, hailed us back. "Good morning, Bobby! I'm working on a self-portrait. What do you think?" He lifted the canvas from his easel and spun it in our direction. The man in the picture was severe and gaunt.
      "It looks nothing like you," Bobby Two observed. "But it's a stunning manifestation of your inner soul." He curled his tongue over his upper lip, a habit he had when he was deep in thought. "It speaks to me of a lost love, someone you obsess upon in the dead of night as you pray for sleep's sweet release from thought."
      "Yes," agreed Bobby One. "You regret the choices you've made in life and despair that you cannot go back. Is that what you were going for?"
      "No," Vinny said, crestfallen. "I wanted it to look like me."
      Bobby Two laughed. "Keep working on it," he said, nudging the painter on the shoulder. "You'll get there."
      As we moved on I heard Vinny mutter to himself, "Dead of night, hmmm? Stars in the sky...."
      We greeted the other illustrators in the aisle on our way to the cafeteria. Eddie -- the other Eddie, not the boss Eddie -- was opening his mouth unnaturally wide as he peered into a mirror and swiveled his head to inspect himself from all angles. He smeared a few streaks of color over his canvas before looking up to acknowledge us. Johnny was busy scrutinizing his smart phone. I paused long enough to peek over his shoulder at the picture he must have taken earlier of a servant girl, her hair bound up in blue. Mike, atop a ladder, was painting angels on the perforated panels of the drop ceiling. He gave us a hearty wave as we passed by.
      The cafeteria was little more than a cooking area walled off by metal panels and ringed by a dotted rectangle of ceiling support posts. The posts are not noteworthy in and of themselves, but someone -- probably Eddie, the boss that is, but we never see him do it -- keeps posting on them helpful motivational posters with titles like Words That Rhyme With "Despondency".
      A bored-looking boy behind the counter mumbled some sort of welcome at our approach. "Can I take your order please?" he droned as Percy stepped up to order.
      "I'd like bitter regret of lost opportunity and a side of home fries," he said.
      "Bitter regret of lost opportunity with fries," the boy shouted back.
      Julia, the cook, acknowledged the order, then caught my eye when she noticed who we were. "Hi!" she said in that peculiarly high-pitched, crackly voice of hers, while Bobby One and Bobby Two negotiated their orders with the boy. "How are you today, my friend?"
      "Fine, and you?"
      "Lovely, always lovely," she said. "How could I not, when I work with such fine people? People who love to eat, you know, are the best people."
      I smiled warmly at this oft-repeated catchphrase of hers.
      "I'd like the sweet hope perching in the soul and asking nothing," Emily said when it was her turn.
      The boy swiveled around to Julia and said, "Sweet hope perching in the soul and..." He faltered.
      "And asking nothing," Emily said.
      "And asking nothing."
      "Very good," Julia said and started fussing over containers of ingredients and throwing things onto a steaming electric grill. "And for you, my dear?" she asked, looking at me.
      "I'll have the same," I said, like I usually do. Someday I'll have the courage to order what I want.
      We lined up at the railing with our plastic trays and waited for our food to arrive. Julia handed it over in identical brown cartons made from recycled paper materials. The cashier at the end of the line was a bulbous toad-like woman with a pair of matching hairy moles, one under each nostril. She stared at Percy's recycled carton as if shocked to discover that this time, as with all the other times, she still couldn't see through it. "What did you have?" she croaked.
      "Bitter regret of lost opportunity," Percy replied. "And a side of home fries."
      She opened a thick leather-bound tome with onion-skin pages, flipped through it a bit, and ran her finger down a column of tiny print. "Bitter..." she began, "...regret."
      "And a side of home fries," Percy reminded.
      "That'll be eight ninety-nine," she declared.
      Percy paid her and carried his tray away to an empty table.
      While Bobby One and Bobby Two paid for their breakfasts -- eight ninety-nine apiece -- Emily and I made idle chitchat about the unseasonably warm weather, and transcendentalism, and the illusion of permanence in a temporal world.
      The cashier interrupted right when Emily was saying something about not having time to die. "What did you have?"
      Emily flashed the woman a congenial smile. "I had sweet hope perching in the soul and asking nothing."
      "Sweet..." the woman groaned, "...hope." She flipped through her book, found a promising header, and ran her finger down the page. "Sweet hope where woven boughs shut out the moon's bright ray. Eight ninety-nine."
      "No," Emily said patiently. "Sweet hope perching in the soul and asking nothing." She ventured a hesitating finger into the cashier's domain.
      The woman ignored her. "Perching..." the woman said, scanning further down the page, "...in the soul. Eight ninety-nine."
      Emily paid the lady and moved away to join the others.
      "I had the same," I told her before she asked.
      "What did you have?" the woman asked anyway.
      "Sweet hope perching in the soul and asking nothing."
      The cashier flipped over a few pages and skimmed the cramped text.
      "Um," I said, "it was back where you were. Eight ninety-nine?"
      The woman shot me a sideways glance, licked her finger, and flipped back. "Sweet..." she said, "...hope."
      "It's there," I said, pointing to the page opposite the one she was examining. "Eight ninety-nine."
      The woman ignored me but traced the text to the bottom of the page, then slowly dragged it over to the next one. I decided there was nothing to do but wait.
      "Eight ninety-nine," she finally declared.
      I paid over my money, already counted and waiting in my hand, and squeezed in at the table next to Emily. I opened my carton of breakfast and took the smell in. A fresh omelette with chicken, brie, and blackberries, dried sage, topped with a glaze of raspberries and caraway seeds.
      "This is heavenly," I told Emily after trying a bite. "How's yours?"
      "Poached eggs and hickory nut squash on ciabatta toast with maple and thyme turkey sausage," Emily gushed. I couldn't tell if she was eating some of it already or still working on her imaginary gum.
      I tell you all this to explain how the day began in such an ordinary fashion, yet soon proved to be the day that defined the rest of my life. Theirs too, kind of. It started when we finished breakfast and went our separate ways to our various cubicles in the writer's department. I had barely settled into my own cube when a freckly intern poked his head in and said, "Eddie wants to see you."
      I slumped back in my chair, sighed, and braced myself for the conversation I was pretty sure we were going to have.
      That's where you came in.

*       *       *       *
      "Now that," Eddie announced in the manner of a man giving a motivational speech just before snipping a ribbon with an oversized pair of scissors, "That is a greeting card!"
      "It's lovely," I agreed.
      "Why, anybody in the world would be proud to send a card like that," Eddie went on, wagging his hand at the now wrinkled paper with Emily's poem on it. "It's beautiful, moving, unafraid to face the grim realities of life but does so with intelligent reflection."
      "Of course, Eddie, but--"
      "Or," Eddie exclaimed, fumbling with both hands for some other specific scrap of paper. "Consider this one from your friend Bobby."
      "Which one?"
      "No, the other one," Eddie clarified. Finding what he was looking for, he snatched up the paper and read aloud.

      Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
          Old Time is still a-flying;
      And this same flower that smiles today
          Tomorrow will be dying.

      The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
          The higher he's a-getting,
      The sooner will his race be run,
          And nearer he's to setting.

      That age is best which is the first,
          When youth and blood are warmer;
      But being spent, the worse, and worst
          Times still succeed the former.

      Then be not coy, but use your time,
          And while ye may, go marry;
      For having lost but once your prime,
          You may forever tarry.

      "There, you see?" Eddie blustered. "Now that's a greeting card I can sell! I can sell these in five-packs to every red-blooded male who ever wanted to make it with a girl. 'Get with me while you can, 'cause you'll be old soon.' The man's a genius!"
      "Universal ideas, exquisitely expressed," I said, repeating one of the corporate mantras. "You're right. Bobby Two is one of the best."
      "You're darn tootin' he's good," Eddie burst, slamming his hands on the desk. "So's your other friend, the mopey one with the bangs in his eyes."
      "Percy?" I asked.
      "Percy," Eddie affirmed and patted across the debris on his desk as if by doing so he could discern the location of yet another specific scrap of paper hiding under the clutter. "Where is it, where is it?" he mumbled. "Ah!" He snatched up a crinkled sheet of yellow legal paper with a ragged upper edge where it had been carelessly torn from its pad. He held it so close to his face I was afraid the end of his glimmering cigar would set it alight, but it didn't. Squinting through the smoke, he read:

      I met a traveller from an antique land,
      Who said -- "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
      Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
      Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
      And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
      Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
      Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
      The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
      And on the pedestal, these words appear:
      My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
      Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
      Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
      Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
      The lone and level sands stretch far away."

      Eddie smiled broadly and let the words hang in the air before he spoke again, as if the majestic sound of his own voice reciting Percy's equally majestic words had stunned him into a humble silence.
      "Do you see what I mean, Anne?" he finally asked.
      "Yes," I said, though I wasn't sure I did. "The words are gorgeous and inspired," I offered.
      Eddie leaned forward. "You said it!" he said, his eyes as bright as the end of his cigar. "Every poor clod who ever got pushed around by anybody in this world can buy that card and say, 'Hey, you. You think you're some big shot? Someday nobody will remember you.'"
      I raised an eyebrow and in an uncharacteristic moment of impudence asked, "Should I send one of those to you?"
      "Your impertinence only proves my point!" Eddie shouted, resuming his earlier volume and improving on it. "Universal ideas, exquisitely expressed! That's what you're supposed to deliver around here! Like Percy! Like Emily! Like Bobbies One and Two! But what do you give me? Ho, ho, yes, let's just see what you give me. Ho, ho, yes, let's just see." He trailed off as he patted the contents of his desk yet again.
      I never liked having my work consumed in my presence. In that way I was different from my friends, who gloried in the attention. Attention just made me feel awkward. When I wrote I did so in the hope that my work would someday find its way to someone who would be heartened by it, or inspired, or comforted, or cheered, but I never wanted to be there when they read it. My work was too personal for me to share in person, and if it achieved what it was supposed to, it would be too personal for them to want me around anyway.
      "I really don't need to hear it," I said hastily. "I understand what you're telling me."
      But Eddie wasn't having any of it. "No, no, no," he glowered. "You sit right there. I'll find it. Ah ha!" He held up a 3x5 index card like he'd just struck gold right there on his desk. He cleared his throat and laid my heart out for me to reflect upon.

      This day my heartfelt wish for you is that
      Your hopes and dreams come true.
      You deserve as much and more because of all
      The special ways you're you.

      Wishing you a happy birthday
      And a year of joyful memories.

      Eddie slammed the card on the desk, crossed his arms, and leaned back, his triumphant expression daring me to dissent.
      "I thought it was a nice sentiment," I offered weakly.
      Eddie bit down on his cigar like he wanted to snap it in half. At the top of his lungs he shouted, "HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO SELL CARDS YOU CAN ONLY USE ONE DAY OF THE YEAR?"
      I shrank in my seat. Unwisely I tried to distract him from that particular piece and see the value in my other works. "Eddie," I said, "that's just one poem. The day before I gave you a lovely poem about Christmas cheer--"
      "What is it with you and annual occasions!?" Eddie thundered, planting his hands flat on his desk and leaning over me. "This is business! How am I supposed to pay you all year long if I can only make money on what you produce once a year? Hmmm? Hmmm?"
      "Well--"
      "My brother-in-law runs a butcher's shop downtown. What do you think he'd say to me if I said to him, 'Hey, ever thought of marketing meat as a seasonal thing?' What do you think he'd tell me? I'll tell you what he'd tell me. He'd tell me the same thing I'm going to tell you right now. And that's -- that's --"
      He floundered for words, then gave up. "I don't know what is I'll tell you right now!" he snapped. He sank back into his chair, planted his elbow on his desk, and cradled his head in his hand.
      But the resignation in his eyes was fleeting, for in the very next instant the gleam of a juicy idea lit up his face. He scoured his desk one final time, pulled out a card, and hastily scratched his signature inside it. "This is what we specialize in here, isn't it?" Eddie oozed in silkily eager tones. "When people are at a loss for words, Ballpark greeting cards come to the rescue." He closed up his pen and the card, stuffed the latter into an envelope, licked the seal, and pounded it closed.
      "Here!" he said, thrusting it in my direction.
      I reached for it tentatively. "Thank you," I said as I wedged a fingernail into an opening at the corner and tore it open.
      I recognized the illustration on the front immediately as Pete's doing. Pete was one of Eddie's favorite painters because usually he painted naked women the same size and shape Eddie was. In this instance, however, the illustration was of a young girl in a pretty blue dress with lace trim and a red bow in her curly red hair and a green watering can in her hand. If she'd been real, I'd have wanted to pinch her cheeks, she was so cute, but I wouldn't have, because she was clearly the kind of girl who fancied herself all grown up and would have taken such a sign of affection as condescension.
      The inside of the card read as follows:

      Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
      Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore--
          While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
      As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
      "'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door--
          Only this and nothing more."

      Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
      In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;
          Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
          But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door--
      Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door--
          Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

      Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
      By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
      "Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no craven,
      Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore--
      Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!"
          Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."

      The words were so beautiful my breath caught, and I don't mind telling you I cried a little. I hadn't seen this one before. It must have been a new one, not yet in production. "Who wrote this?" I asked.
      I looked up, and he was misty-eyed too. "Eddie," he said quietly.
      He didn't mean himself, and he didn't mean the painter Eddie, either. The other other Eddie.
      I basked in the words and the music they made in my head a moment longer. Gradually I came back to myself. Eddie the boss hadn't given me Eddie the writer's poem just so I could revel in it. Eddie the boss was trying to tell me something.
      I skimmed the poem a second time, then flipped the cover over and regarded the girl with the watering can. I looked up. "I don't understand what you're trying to tell me," I confessed.
      "I'm saying," Eddie growled, munching on his cigar amidst the plumes of smoke, "that unless you give me something I can sell by tomorrow, you will nevermore work for the Ballpark Greeting Card Company. You'll be fired!"
      I swallowed. My upper lip trembled, but I kept my voice steady. "Yes, sir," I said.

*       *       *       *
      The day went by in a haze. I don't know what I wrote that day. All I remember is the knot of anxiety in my stomach. When closing time arrived, I was oblivious of it. Bobby One had to come find me. I guess the others were all waiting for me at the front door.
      "Staying here all night?" Bobby One asked.
      "Oh," I said, stirring and checking the time. Ten past already. "No, I'm coming."
      I gathered my things, stuffed them hastily in my bag, and stood. One of the things I'd scooped up was a scrap of doggerel I'd written in the fog of the afternoon. When I brushed past Bobby One to lead the way out, the poem caught on something and fluttered to the floor.
      Bobby One was a gentleman and would have picked it up for me, but I was quicker than he was. I looked to see what had fallen and saw it lying there.
      In that moment, my life split. I don't know how to explain it any better than that. In the same instant I did two different things. One of the things I did was turn to Bobby One and say, "Never mind that; I don't need it," and I left it there as we walked out.
      The other thing I did was pick it up and stuff it into my bag.
      You can't do two things at once. I know that. But I did. And the weirdest part about it? That one trifling little decision wound up shaping the rest of my life. I know, because I remember both versions of me, the one that picked it up and the one that left it for the cleaning crew to sweep up that evening.
      The latter story is easy to tell. I lost my job the next day. I lived on the kindness of my friends for a while, but we drifted apart in the months to come, and they became more like strangers. I got a job waitressing a few weeks later, and when I saved enough money to pay my friends back I moved out. I married the restaurant manager's son, and we have three beautiful kids. I don't write much anymore, and when I do I do it in the well of the gable in our bedroom when no one else is home. My daughter caught me once. On a whim I recited a line or two of what I'd jotted down that day. It made her eyes light up, and her cheeks flushed with pride and pleasure. That me is happy. Really she is.
      The other version of me is more complicated. I kept my job. Later I bought the Ballpark Greeting Card Company's parking lot from Eddie, built a rival greeting card company on it, and became an artist and entrepreneur of some considerable renown, if it's not too boastful to say so. Percy...well, I got over him eventually. I had to. He developed an infatuation with a spooky girl who was always meditating on life and death. Eventually they ran away together. The rest of us stayed close. I can't decide how that version of me feels about herself. Sometimes I think she's the best possible me. Sometimes.
      I'm the only one who remembers both lives. My friends all seem blissfully unaware of their other selves, but I think Bobby One suspects something. He's the one that was with me when I made both choices at once, so maybe he sensed it somehow. At first he didn't act like anything was amiss, but about a month later, after a particularly difficult day of juggling my two selves, Bobby One took me aside.
      "May I tell you a story, Anne?" Bobby One asked in the tone of voice one uses at an intervention.
      I hesitated. "Sure," I said.
      Bobby One was an earnest man. But on that day he stared deeply into my eyes with a sincerity I'd rarely seen in him before. Then he opened his mouth and recited a poem.

      Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
      And sorry I could not travel both
      And be one traveler, long I stood
      And looked down one as far as I could
      To where it bent in the undergrowth;

      Then took the other, as just as fair,
      And having perhaps the better claim,
      Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
      Though as for that the passing there
      Had worn them really about the same,

      And both that morning equally lay
      In leaves no step had trodden black.
      Oh, I kept the first for another day!
      Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
      I doubted if I should ever come back.

      I shall be telling this with a sigh
      Somewhere ages and ages hence:
      Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
      I took the one less traveled by,
      And that has made all the difference.

      I recognized the poem. I knew it by heart. How could I not? It was Ballpark's best seller three years running. Bobby recited it at parties. He used it to pick up girls. He performed it at his mother's funeral. But this time he said it just for me.
      "It matters which path you choose," he said, barely above a whisper. "But it matters more that you choose."
      I knew without knowing how that he was talking about my dilemma. I couldn't go on like this. I couldn't keep hold of both my lives.
      But I said nothing to him about any of that. Instead I furrowed my brow. "Bobby," I said in somewhat admonishing tones. "That's not what your poem means. That's what everybody says your poem means, and you've spent all the time I've known you complaining how they all misunderstand."
      "Do I?" he asked, raising an eyebrow. "What do you think it means then?"
      I gave him a bewildered look. "It means that people's choices don't really matter at all, but they try to convince themselves they did, to ascribe some sort of meaning to their lives. That's what you said."
      "Did I?" Bobby asked. "I suppose I did." Then with a shrug and a careless grin he said, "Well, if it's me against everyone else, who's to say who's right or wrong?"
      Not me.
      At least, not yet.

Samuel Stoddard