The choices nobody announces

Some choices announce themselves. Tea or juice. The window seat or the aisle. We notice making them, and we feel we have chosen.

Most of what shapes a day was decided somewhere quieter.

The family that takes the bigger flat on the edge of Riyadh, because the rent is kinder, has also chosen an hour and a half in traffic every working day. Nobody signed that part. It came folded inside the lease.

The couple who buy a pale sofa for a home with three small children have chosen a year of watching every cup that comes near it.

The man who agrees to host the whole family for every holiday has also agreed to the tense week of preparation before each one.

Staying silent in a friendship that has started to hurt is a choice too, renewed every week by doing nothing.

These choices are costly, and they rarely feel like choices because nobody presents them as one. Often someone would prefer we did not look closely: the commute that never appears on the floor plan, the price that is quoted in small monthly pieces.

Looking is uncomfortable. It is easier to call these things circumstances, the way life is, bad luck.

They are not. They were picked, by us, on the day we picked the thing they came attached to.