Check-ins

Having it out

Prakriti and Jordan had been married four years when she first raised the idea of living a more interesting life than they did. He was a software engineer at a medium-sized SaaS company and she was a designer at a luxury hydration brand. They lived in a new build in the West Loop. They were walking home from the gym, a daily after-work ritual for both of them, when Prakriti said that she had hoped for a more interesting life than just working a 9-5 job for someone else and going out to restaurants. Jordan reminded her that they went to movies sometimes too, and she agreed. He was quiet for a while and then asked her what would be more exciting to her.

“Well, it sounds stupid—but, like, traveling?” she said, looking and feeling confused.

Jordan helpfully pointed out that they did travel; working remotely from places all over the world for weeks at a time, trying restaurants in new cities, going to weddings a few times a year.

“Right, no, but—like, traveling but less comfortable? Like backpacking.” She didn’t sound convinced by herself.

“Why would that be better than traveling but more comfortable?” he asked.

“No, I mean, like—no, that makes sense,” she conceded. She took a second to gather her thoughts. “I just get the sense that there’s a way of being in the world that’s more alive, more engaged, deeper, more meaningful than what we’re doing now, which seems to be what everyone else is doing.”

In a very gentle tone, so as to not sound patronizing, Jordan pointed out that everyone else was doing the same thing as them because they were doing that thing, which led them to only meet people who were doing the same type of thing. Prakriti caught onto the gentleness and its intent and felt patronized anyway.

“No, you’re not getting it. There are people out there. People who, like, feel things very deeply and follow their passions and desires, and who do things for reasons that are beyond—” and here she stopped and gestured to the various tall buildings around them “—all of this.”

“What is this?” he chuckled.

“Like, money, I guess. And living in a city. And being comfortable.”

“Do you want to quit your job?” he asked. “If I recall correctly, you actually like money and being comfortable.”

“No, no,” she blustered, “you’re right. I do like money. But yeah, maybe I want to quit my job.”

“Well, I’d quit my job too,” he said.

“You would?” she was shocked.

He shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, we’re young and we don’t have a kid yet.”

“So we’ll quit our jobs and travel?”

He agreed and they spent the evening excitedly talking about the Plan. It was agreed that they’d save for a year until they hit a target number, and then they’d quit and backpack through “Asia”—to Jordan, this vaguely included Japan, which interested Prakriti, and to Prakriti, this vaguely included India, which didn’t interest Jordan at all—but the place they agreed they should start with was Chiang Mai, Thailand. Reddit, Google, various SEO blogs, random influencers on X agreed—Chiang Mai was the gateway to Southeast Asia, a cheap and yummy paradise readymade for revelatory expat experiences.

That night, they had very intense sex after excitedly hyping up the Plan and profusely declaring their love for one another. This was a mistake; it transmuted the logistical energy of the process into an erotic engine. For the next few months, mentions of the Plan became inextricably linked to loving eroticism, and the idea of going to Thailand left the realm of the real and entered the world of fantasy, painted upon the bedroom ceiling, something to point at and excitedly giggle about in intimate moments but never something that required serious sacrifice, planning, or constraints. Eventually, both of them lost the vigor that bubbled up upon each mention of the Plan, and it began to take the shape of another burdensome task in their lives, alongside Prakriti’s abandoned watercolor practice and Jordan’s plateauing heavy lifts. Everything became Netflix for a while, and then it became Max, and then Paramount Plus. A month of reading snuck in, and then it had been a year since the Plan was even mentioned. It became scary to even think of mentioning it, to reopen the door of excitement, to acknowledge their collective failure.

Ten years to the day after the original Plan was supposed to have happened, Jordan and Prakriti lay in bed on their phones. Prakriti, unthinking and scrolling through photo memories, said something about how wow, ten years ago we were supposed to have quit our jobs—crazy!

Jordan stood up. “I can’t believe you said something,” he said with awe. “I thought about it today too.”

“Can you believe it,” she said without looking up. “We were so young and stupid.”

“Hey,” he said, completely seriously. “I don’t actually think we were so stupid. It would have been a real experience. Something real and amazing. I wish we’d followed through. I can’t believe we’re actually talking about it.”

Prakriti looked up, surprised at his intensity. “Well, we can’t do it now,” she said. “We have two kids. And my parents are old.”

“Right, no,” he said. “I get that. It’s actually more exciting to me to just talk about it after ten years of thinking about it but not saying anything.”

“I was so angry at you for letting the idea go,” said Prakriti. “I wish you’d pushed more.”

“But you had the same—you—” Jordan started. He slowed down. “I guess I felt the same way as you; I wish you hadn’t given up on it too.”

“I guess I can be that way with all my projects,” said Prakriti quietly. “I can’t believe it happened with the one we were doing together too.”

They’d read relationship books, taken classes and lessons, but they’d never been able to actually reach the nirvana of communicating in this way before. They’d seen other couples zoom out like this, talk with equanimity, but their lives were such that every interaction had become charged with resentment, reassurance, the weight of history. But the way they spoke now wasn’t accusatory or angry, filled with resentment or longing or joy. It was a sober and distanced conversation, an honest reckoning with their feelings for each other and about their lives, a conversation where they could represent themselves and only themselves without reaching into each other’s spheres to alternately support and antagonize one another. They felt godlike, serene, peaceful. This was it; this was the way they were meant to communicate; nonjudgmental and open. They spoke for hours and slept entangled for the first time in years.

Ten years to the date after that conversation, they were driving to their friend’s lake house in Western Michigan.

“Twenty years ago,” said Prakriti, “we were going to quit our jobs.”

Jordan gripped the wheel tighter. The four hours sped by as the last ten years spilled from them, the release cathartic and almost orgasmic as they saw each other anew in their words, processing events that had occurred years prior and the continued weight of those events on their minds.

“Why didn’t we keep talking like this?” said Jordan. “I like this.”

“I like this too,” said Prakriti. “But something about our lives doesn’t let us do this.”

“Well,” said Jordan, “can’t we change?”

Eight years later, Prakriti was sitting on the patio of their new lake house, watching videos on her phone and sipping a Long Island Iced Tea. Jordan came outside.

“Can you believe that twenty-eight years ago, we were going to quit our jobs?” He’d been hyping himself up to begin one of their Special Talks, as he so often referred to them in his head, for years now. He was desperate for the release, desperate to hear and be heard.

Prakriti didn’t even look up. “Fuck you,” she said. “We’re not doing this for two more years.”

Jordan protested. It didn’t have to be every ten years; they’d only done it twice now so there was no real pattern.

“What connects two points?” said Prakriti, disinterested. “This is an every ten years thing. At this point, it’s tradition. This is what we do for the rest of our lives; we have those Big Talks every ten years.”

“We talk about everything else,” Jordan whined. “Why do we have to keep this kind of communication constrained? It’s so arbitrary, following a pattern because it exists.”

“Patterns exist for a reason,” said Prakriti.

“That’s—that’s not true. They almost exist in spite of not having a reason to exist.”

“You’re being a baby,” said Prakriti, and that was that.

Two years later, they had a beautiful evening in a hot tub, talking about everything they had been thinking about, not the everyday thoughts but the true thoughts about their marriage and their lives, each other’s families and their kids, what they actually thought of their kids, whether or not they actually even really enjoyed parenthood. Jordan felt free and happy and safe, and he felt despair at the idea of living small for the next ten years just to live big for one night.

“What if we did our trip now? The kids are gone, we have money. We can easily take a sabbatical from work. Let’s do it. Let’s do it now.”

And maybe it was the heat of the hot tub, or the ecstasy of the moment, or maybe Prakriti actually did feel once again the ineffable draw of living a “real life,” something she’d long dismissed as a youthful and romantic and flawed idea, preferring instead the everyday engagement and investment in the present that she’d practiced for thirty years, but she said “Okay,” and they booked plane tickets and bought 60L Osprey backpacks that very night.

Two weeks later, they were hiking through a jungle in Thailand when they were set upon by one of the five remaining wild tigers in the world and eaten. The tiger crunched and munched on their bones, licking them clean and sucking out the tender and delicious marrow inside. The energy gained from that interaction inspired the tiger to find another tiger and copulate, creating a tiger cub that would grow up to become the world’s last remaining wild tiger, a symbol of the dying environmental movement. The Thai government named the tiger Kittipong Phlonlakkathon.

One thousand years later, a robot found the decayed bones of Jordan and Prakriti buried under the sands of a Thai beach. They were genetically reconstructed and placed into the Chiang Mai zoo, where robot hatchlings would go and laugh and poke at organic beings.

“This fucking sucks,” said Prakriti one day.

“Agreed, bro,” said Jordan. “Mofuckin agreeeed.”

Nabeel’s Footnote

Imagining how people pronounce the word Prakriti in their heads while reading—probably not even close. “Praaw-kree-tee.” Lol