Twenty years in a job that wasn't the dream

A sixty-five-year-old woman in Japan wrote this in a free-response survey: "I gave up my dream when I took a job. I should have tried, even if I failed." She joined a stable company and doesn't blame herself for it. But twenty years on, whenever she looks out the window, she tries to remember the shape of the dream she folded away. Failure can be laughed at later. Longing just ages.