You worry a lot but that’s only because you care.
So you reach out.
You exchange pleasantries and the conversation shifts to, “How are you?” and you answer without really thinking too much about it.
“I’m fine.”
You don’t think too much about it, not because no one has ever asked but because you never really had to think very much about it. It’s a complete sentence, a statement of fact. You’re fine. You are fine. You are fine.
What does the word “fine” mean anyway? It’s a little arbitrary; you could have picked any word really. A word is just a word, an assortment of letters that have been assigned meaning.
There are a lot of ways you can define a word.
The word in question is most often used synonymously with “okay.”
Not good, not bad.
Just okay.
You spend so much time and effort checking in with everyone else that you’ve forgotten to check in with yourself, so I have to ask: are you okay?