Not Looking

Friday night, the boys on the team organized another happy hour. I went. Don't read into it — it's just that if I skip, I won't get a single reference they make at Monday standup, and that is true social death.

At the bar: five SWEs, five IPAs, still talking about K8s. Somebody brought up the new VP; somebody brought up so-and-so who jumped ship to the competitor for double the package. I held my cider, nodding and smiling — same customer-service mode as daytime, just with the background audio swapped from HVAC to indie rock.

My tech lead is called Ryan. He sat diagonally across from me and told three jokes, none of them funny, all of which I laughed at. Ryan is good-looking, smart, dependable, and reviews my code with exactly twenty percent more gentleness than anyone else's. The whole team can see there's something there. Including me.

The problem is he has a girlfriend. Long-distance, in New York, in law. Every time he mentions her it's light, offhand — offhand the way you talk about a service you're deprecating but haven't gotten around to shutting down.

My principle on this kind of thing is pretty simple: don't touch it. A romantic race condition kills whoever touches it first.

Then there's Kevin from infra. Kevin "happens" to materialize at the microwave on my floor every Wednesday and asks if I want to grab lunch. This week he shipped an upgrade: did I want to go hiking this weekend?

"I'm on call this weekend," I said.

I was not on call. But Kevin — look, great résumé, not a bad guy, it's just that talking to him is like reading API documentation. Every sentence is correct. Not one of them makes you want to keep reading.

Vivi asked if maybe my bar was too high. I said it's not that my bar is high, it's that I'm not listed on the market at all. On my life roadmap, everything before thirty reads: green card, make senior, save money, and then — then we'll see. Love, as a feature, is P3. Bottom of the backlog. Punted every single quarter.

"That's not a roadmap," Vivi said. "That's avoidance, la."

"Avoidance is a legitimate architecture decision."

That cracked her up, and then she looked at me a beat too long, and the look turned serious. "A-Dai. It's not that you don't want it. You're scared that if you want it, you can't plan it."

I didn't answer. Out the window, headlights on the 101 streamed south in long strings.

She was pretty much exactly right. Annoyingly right 🙃

That night I had the dream again. The grey sea, the low houses, wind strong enough to blow a crack open in a person's chest. In the dream I wasn't in a hurry, wasn't chasing any deadline, just standing there. There was someone beside me — I couldn't see who. And I wasn't afraid at all.

When I woke, the alarm hadn't gone off yet. I stared at the ceiling and thought: strange. The me in that dream is more like me than the one who's awake.

I filed love at the bottom of the backlog.

Unfortunately, fate is the kind of PM who never reads your roadmap.