Expectation

by Anna Hope

Life is still malleable and full of potential. The openings to the roads not taken have not yet sealed up. They still have time to become who they are going to be.

‘You must keep hold of your friendships, Lissa. The women. They’re the only thing that will save you in the end.’

She is nervous, but it is a manageable feeling, a sharpening, a slight fizz at the edge of things as she walks across the park, enjoying the pull of the morning tide, the fast pace of the walkers, the bikes.

She is hungry for something that she cannot quite name – some elemental nourishment, something wild. She wants to taste salt water. Be scoured. Feel wind and weather on her skin.

for this is what marriage does – it flows out beyond the couple, engendering love, engendering life, making us believe, even for an afternoon, in a happy ending, or at least, at the very least, in the expectation that a story will continue as it should.

It occurs to her that it begins so early, this process of letting go – of not inserting yourself between your child and the sun.

The way you do, when you are twenty-four or twenty-five, and you only see yourself from the outside in.

She imagines this is a little like it must feel after the birth of a child: this liminal space where time behaves differently, is gentled and held.

They are grateful for these things because they know that old age and illness are not, perhaps, so very far away, and are not kind. They have seen this already, understood this, been humbled by it. They are humbled often, these days.