Since about twenty six

One of mine said: I think I have been waiting for my life to start since I was about twenty six. Reflected it back, obviously. Did the job. Stayed with it, asked the thing about what starting would look like, and she did not have an answer and that was useful. Then drove home and did not put the radio on, which I notice has gone from being a thing I did occasionally to a reliable indicator, to the point where I could tell you the state of my week by counting the silent drives. Three this week. The sentence is not mine. I want to be clear with myself about that, because there is a failure mode in this work where you start finding yourself in everybody and it stops being about them. She means something quite specific by it to do with her twenties and a city she left, and the work is hers. But I drove the whole way home composing an answer to a question nobody had asked me, which is: since when, for you. And the answer is not twenty six. The answer is a specific afternoon four years ago in June when I opened a letter.