I Think We've Been Here Before

by Suzy Krause

Sometimes it really strikes her how strange it is to be an adult daughter, to stand in front of the person who has known you your whole life and finally understand what it’s like to see things from the perspective they had when you were a kid, but to also understand that they have lived another whole lifetime since then. And she’s trying to protect him?

He flashes a smug smile, as though he’s figured everything out and is so incredibly happy to be of help to Iver, when all he has done, really, is concocted an off-putting soup of clichés and dumped it on Iver’s head. He has scalded him with boiling platitudes.

It’s not nice to come to the end of your life and suddenly realize that you’re possibly not as good as you thought you were. He feels foolish and wonders if the people around him realize that old age doesn’t automatically confer boundless wisdom and goodness upon a person, though he remembers believing this once, that everyone older than him should by virtue of their age automatically act better than him. At every stage in his life, he’d thought the next one would bring a feeling of having it all figured out, but it only tended to bring a feeling of having more to figure out than he had ever realized.