The Mykonos beach is sparkling champagne fizz, but all I can think about is how, in forty-eight hours, I’ll be back in a cubicle. Dread: it crests over me like the rolling waves crashing along the coast last night. I glance at my boyfriend. He’s sprawled over a towel, nose wedged in a used physics book.

I envy how physics arrives to Ryan like a second skin, a fixation that has become his full time job. He reads physics material even on vacation, whilst I scurry to hide myself and my thoughts of my own inadequacy from the sun. If he were a food, he’d be a tiny square of baklava—the physics of syrup diffusion coursing through his veins. I’m more like this overcompensating triple-decker cheeseburger I’ve ordered from the beach grill. I lick the juice dribbling from the sides.

Food in one hand and iPhone in the other, this should feel like paradisos. Instead, a Reddit thread holds me hostage. One commenter asks, “If she’s smart enough to fool you into thinking she’s smart, isn’t that smart enough for you?” Lately, I’ve been wondering the same. How can that be enough for him? Will that be enough to sustain a lifetime of conversation?

Surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, they said. So they can prop you up. Never let yourself be the smartest in the room. Ok, fine. But where’s the advice on how to confront the reality of squatting in the pool of knowledge that you’re the stupidest in the room? And what then of marriage? When the two of you sign off on staying in the same room in perpetuity, are you signing off on a lifetime of being the stupid one?

The bottom bun caves in on itself in my hands. It’s a mess. A sopping web of cheese sauce everywhere. I can’t help but dry laugh.

“Are you okay,” Ryan asks.

No. The burger patties sting my bare thighs. “Probably.”

Ryan jumps up, whips the towel from under him, and scoops the majority of it off. Then, he sucks his teeth. There’s a big red sunburn underneath. Ryan pats my head. “My little Isaac Newton. Stay here, I’ll try to find you an ice pack.”

How am I always so careless?

I stare at Ryan’s retreating back. I am so lucky. Dad likes to joke that if people could be honest during job interviews, I should blatantly admit that my strength is my luck. When the judges announced my name for National YoungArts poet, the first thing he said was, “My lucky girl.” When my philosophy essay won that scholarship: “That’s my lucky little girl.” When I landed my first sales job out of college, that was luck too. Maybe that’s why every extra year they keep me on feels like some supervisor’s oversight.

It does always feel like luck, precarious and fleeting. Like I’m only as good as my last large close. What skills have I acquired in the meantime? I’ve certainly gotten better at pretending to know everything, when in fact, I know nothing. The longer I stay at this job, the more my conviction about knowing nothing grows—except of course, the highly prized skill of how to send our inventory list into the void. “We’re creating customer buy-in, Michy. We’re establishing trust! We create revenue,” our sales lead, Mike, reiterated. “I’m concerned that you’re losing confidence. It’s an important part of the job.” Really, I’d just gained the confidence to question directly, and this confidence for once, was not softened with an apology. Mike seemed perturbed.

Ryan’s back with a cup of ice. Should we really be icing a sunburn? I mean…if Ryan thinks so.

He may just be my biggest stroke of luck yet. I worry that I’ve used up all my remaining fortune luring him in, and there’ll be none left in the cauldron to offset my inability to do mental math or understand the underlying assets I’m selling. Not that anyone else on the salesforce does either.

“I’m sorry,” I say, feigning a smile as he applies a loose cube to the area.

“It’s okay,” he says today.

I wait for more. He used to say, “Don’t apologize! You have nothing to apologize for.” There’s no more. Who will remind me to stop listlessly apologizing if not him? Me?

The ice berates my raw skin, which blisters like gritty sand. I try to summon thoughts of literally anything else. “So…how’s the book so far?”

“It’s great! Did you know that there used to be no distinction between physicist and philosopher? The Greeks would have grouped me with Aristotle, Plato, and all the other Grecian rationalists.”

Ryan’s confidence is tall and striking. Not unlike his own evergreen build. Does he hear his own statuesque certainty?

I can picture him thriving in Ancient Greece. He’d be a professor in that lifetime, too, teaching in an olive grove like Plato. He’d inspire passion through living his, through and through. He’d urge his students to question everything, publicly. Declaratively.

When did I stop asking questions out loud? When did I start questioning my self-worth more than the people around me and their frivolous truths? When did I start lying to myself about what it is I truly want—from a career, from a life? Even paradiso cannot pacify all.

In my mind’s eye, Greek statesmen wrestle across the Parthenon floor. Senators make their persuasive, salesmen-esque appeals. Cloudlike words. Fluff, but delivered with such inexplicable certainty. And in the middle of the brawling, both the physical and verbal carnage, there I am. Alone. Tearing myself to confetti.

I let myself moan. “Fuck, Ryan, I think you’re making it worse.” I fling the ice cube to the sand.

The truth tastes vile, but even the single grain of it lifts my chest closer to paradiso than the beach ever did.