[ It's difficult, not starting from scratch. At the back of his mind Nate knows he's always going to be thinking about it in these terms, with these conditions, with caveats attached to another world and another life. A desire to avoid being presumptuous about what this is and how he's balancing it with the shit show that is the rest of his afterlife.

He's seconds away from pointing out that he never went to high school, so no worries, but Ian interjects further and Nate's mouth shuts with a dull click, waiting out the storm of conflicting emotions.

It's a sentiment Nate strongly identifies with and, more than that, something he regrets he didn't recognize sooner before he decided to take a deep dive into accidental existentialism. He's so unbelievably tired of carrying the big things around day in and day out, every twenty-four hours depositing some new horror on their collective doorstep. The problems are regional. Global.

And he's tired. Watching Ian in the periphery, he recognizes an old tell for discomfort, the forced coolness with which he sidesteps the emotion as soon as it rises to the surface.

God, he's good at that. ]

No, I- I get it. Sometimes I wish I had problems like "oh crap, I lost my wallet" instead of "oh crap, time for another interdimensional vortex to swallow us whole".

[ Something he thinks they all might relate to, one way or another. He didn't mean to bring them to this point, but recognizing what's top of mind is the first step in learning how to avoid dwelling on it the way they're being trained to. ]

So...thank you. [ A little lighter, less burdened. ] For giving me the opportunity to agonize over what I'm wearing.