I finished sitting at the mahogany dining room table. Then I sat at the stark white kitchen table. I moved between the two for variety. I annoyed my mother while she cooked lunch, hoping the day would go faster.

"You're going to have to stop waiting for him," my mom said. "It's dragging your whole life down."

"I don't have a life."

"He's not as great a guy as you think. If he'd cheat on his wife, he'd cheat on you."

"He loves me, Mom. I know he loves me."

"He could love you and still never be able to leave his family, and you have to accept that."

I moved back to the dining room. I knew I should not want to get back together; I needed to find a real job. I knew I was wasting brain cells planning our future. But it was so hard to plan my future without him. It was hard to draw pictures from scratch. It would be so much easier to start with a picture of his hair, or his house, or his money.

In the last story there is a congregation of three times of her life: her childhood, expressed by the return to her mother and her old house, willing for protection (“stark white kitchen table”: for her, the house is limited to the kitchen, which is severe, with the colours absent, and the dining room, trapped); her adult age, which has failed and has overcome her, so she has come back to the starting point, the family, already given up the idea of independence; and her future, that does not want to accept. She moves in between the three, stuck, like with the seats, uneasy. In the lapse she is under the cover of her mom's wing she does not have to decide to seek her life, and moans about what she had before being abandoned. To start again she would need a support: “his hair, or his house, or his money”.

Her mother embodies the advices supposed to have a healthy life. She stresses for her child the disappointments counsels her: “he'd cheat on you”, “you have to accept that”. She personifies the idea of society of a healthy life, and her child knows that she has not followed it, so she assumes that “I don't have a life”, meaning that she has failed achieving all their perspectives, the common perspectives of happiness.

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