The price of not deciding

Two friends in Riyadh have run a small print shop together for six years. One of them has known for most of this year that he wants out.

He has not said it. Each week he finds a reason why this is not the week. A large order is due. His partner's father has been unwell. The accounts are not finished. The conversation he is avoiding would take one evening. It would be uncomfortable, possibly very. And then it would be done.

Instead he carries it. He opens the shutter with it every morning and takes it home every night. The stress he is trying to avoid by waiting is not avoided at all. It is spread thin across every day, and it keeps growing.

That is the strange thing about a hard decision. The difficulty is almost never about today. A hard evening is hard because of what it sets in motion for next month and next year. Which means the right question is not how bad tonight will be. It is how many good days that one bad evening would buy.

Months of them, probably. A clean split while the business is healthy. A friendship still intact. His own next thing begun while he still has the energy for it.

Stalling feels free because the bill does not arrive at once. But it does arrive, and it arrives twice: first as the weeks of dread, and then as the higher cost of a decision that would have been simpler, and kinder, back when he first knew.