The restaurant where we used to celebrate everything closed last Tuesday. The owner sent an email, which is the modern way of saying goodbye to people you have fed for fifteen years.

I read it twice and then I sat with my coffee for longer than was reasonable, trying to remember the first thing we ever ordered there. A regular is just a stranger who has been showing up long enough that the staff stops asking how they want their coffee, and then one day the building goes dark and the regulars are strangers again, dispersed.

The neighborhood will absorb it. That's what neighborhoods do. But I keep noticing the empty windows on my walk home, the brown paper taped from inside, the small typed sign about new tenants soon. It is never soon enough.

A friend asked me what I would tell my younger self if I had five minutes alone with her. I said: not very much, probably, because she would not be listening. The eight-year-old version of me was famously stubborn, the kind of child who decides a thing is true and then defends it from all evidence to the contrary.

But if she were quiet for a moment, I might say: the things you are most embarrassed about will be the most useful later. The way your face turns red when someone teases you. The way you keep notebooks under your pillow. The way you read at the dinner table when nobody is looking. These are not problems to fix.

I have not gone soft on advice; I still think most of it is a way for the older person to feel useful. But every once in a while I wish someone had told me that what felt like a flaw was actually a method.