In Five Years

by Rebecca Serle

The future is the one thing you can count on not abandoning you, kid, he’d said. The future always finds you. Stand still, and it will find you. The way the land just has to run to sea.

She is the easiest to love, and gives love freely. But she’s fragile, too. A membrane of skin stretches so thinly over her emotions it’s always threatening to burst.

There are always reasons, and good ones, too, but none of them are why.

At the end of the day, law comes down to what is written, and we do the writing.

“I’m happy,” I tell him. “I’m glad,” he says. “Because either way, you’re stuck with me.”

And I, I want to share all my love, with you. No one else will do.

I’m going to fight for you, but I need you in here with me.”

She is rosy-cheeked and full and radiant. She is an impressionist painting. She is life incarnate.

“It’s important that you know that I’m not going anywhere.”

All I remember is his promise. I take it. I hold it in my heart like proof.

“And she’s spontaneous in the way people aren’t anymore. She lives for now.”

This is the thing she’s wanted forever. This, right here. This is love.

“They’re investments in your future happiness,” she tells me. “Only buy what you love.”

We are like constellations passing each other, seeing each other’s light but in the distance.

And I think that maybe that is what love is. Not the absence of space but the acknowledgment of it, the thing that lives between the parts, the thing that makes it possible not to be one, but to be different, to be two.

“You mistake love. You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn’t. It’s the only thing that does not need to become at all. It matters only insofar as it exists. Here. Now. Love doesn’t require a future.”

“You’re still you, she’s still her. You still have emotions. You’ll still fight. You can try and be perfect, but it will backfire. Just keep being here, instead.”

I snap a picture. I love you, I write. What else is there to say?

And then I met David and everything fit and I knew it was what I had been looking for, that we were meant to unfold these chapters together, side by side.

“You’re not going anywhere,” I tell her. “We’re going to fight this just as we always have.”

“You always wanted someone who would just know it was you. You always wanted your soul mate. And you found him.”

If there’s a clock ticking toward anything, it should be your happiness.”

“I wish you knew that. I wish you understood that you could have love beyond your wildest dreams. Stuff movies are made of. You’re meant for that, too.”

“I love you, but I’m sick of being the person who fits in your life but not your… fuck it, your heart.”

And it hurts. It feels like a tornado raging inside my soul. It feels like I may not survive it. “You will,” she tells me. “You already have.”

Slowly, gently, as if he’s afraid he’ll burn me, he puts his hands on my face in answer. They’re cold. They smell like cigarette smoke. They are the deepest, truest form of relief. Water after seventy-three days in the desert.