"How can you be so calm?"

We're laying in bed and some of the consequences of my behavior loom on the horizon.
She's scared.
She's upset.
Inwardly, I sigh, outwardly my brow furrows but I don't say anything except an expressive blink of the eyes.

"You learn to just accept things you cannot control. It's something I've learned the hard way: through experience."

She doesn't understand because her life has largely been sheltered, and the times it was not have been few and far between. The time she lives in now, minus my arrival, has largely returned to this narrative. She has money, people, things, society to fall back on. She lives her life in the lines nad she came from enough money and status and privilege that she can follow the rules and be rewarded.

She's not the poor brown or black people in the mud.
She's not the occupied or the disenfranchised.

She knows her experience and that efficacy is its own truth and proof and perspective and reality.

I hold her and know that as the days tick by the cataclysm is coming and that I'm going to lose some things, people, work, and the money in the process but on the other side I will emerge even tougher and more unflappable than before.

This is my truth. This is my reality. This is my choice.
I choose, therefore I am.