I got through another semester of law school. I gave in and started using supplements to study and my laptop to type exams. For some reason I started law school in the fall curious to see how I would do without the help of outside reading material or any technology invented in the last ten years. Now I know, and the answer is poorly. (Or, generously, kind of okay, given how much I handicapped myself while being graded on a curve.) The good news is, based on the one grade I got back so far from the spring, I’m not a complete idiot and can actually get a decent grade when I just suppress my instinct to makes things as difficult as possible for myself. By the way, if any evolutionary psychology experts have an explanation for why I even have that instinct in the first place, I’d be very interested to hear it…

Speaking of improvements from the fall to the spring semester, my Ader-wound is pretty much healed, or as healed as it’s ever going to be. There was a brief relapse last week when he called to tell me that he’s engaged to his new girlfriend, but I simply had to come up with a new, more realistic fantasy, and I’m back to being emotionally functional. Instead of holding on to my hope that we would get married shortly after I’m done with law school, I’m now accepting that he’ll marry this girl who his family approves of, move back to Morocco, and have kids with her.

I’ll get my career started, write a few books, eventually have three homes and rent out the two I’m not living in, one in Paris, one in Berlin, and one somewhere in the southern hemisphere so that I never have to deal with winter. Ader and I will keep in touch like we do now, a phone call every few weeks. Once in a while, if we happen to be in Paris at the same time, we’ll see each other for coffee, and I’ll always behave myself lest his wife forbid him from having any more contact with him.

Then one day, when I’m in my early sixties and a little wrinkly from all the sun exposure but still in reasonably good shape because I never had to get pregnant so Ader would stop talking about his damn clock, he’ll show up in Paris and tell me that his kids have left the nest and that he had an epiphany and got divorced and he’ll ask me to meet him at Place-de-Chatelet like we did for our first date. He’ll say, “Pousette, you were right all along. The point of life is not to get into heaven but to enjoy it while it lasts. If god even exists he doesn’t care that I marry another Muslim, just that I do my best to leave the world a better place than I found it. Which is why I’m sorry that I didn’t listen to you and used all those plastic water bottles and got a car even though I lived right next to a bus stop and a metro station, and why I’m begging you to please just let me spend every second of what little time I have left with you.”

Of course I’ll say yes, and we’ll travel the world with all the money I’ve hoarded over a life spent alone, glad that in the end, things finally makes some sense.