In Five Years

by Rebecca Serle

He always knows the things you’re supposed to ask—how you’re supposed to behave. He always remembers the protocol.

I imagine David wearing a sweater and a gold band on his ring finger, opening wine in our kitchen on a cozy winter night. A sense of sustained comfort. The materials of a warm life.

hear Bella’s feet on the stairs. I can always tell it’s her. I know the way her body sounds. I can hear the way she walks, honed from decades of sleepovers, her cushioned feet padding around the kitchen for late-night snacks. If I were blind, I think, I’d be able to tell every time she entered a room.

I imagine being pregnant. Shopping in this store for my own tiny creation. It makes me want a cocktail.

Meeeeee

To whatever beyond has brought forth this reality. For a moment, I don’t remember the future I once saw. I am overcome by the one that is solidly, undeniably present here.

What would happen if we just pretended we’d never heard? Would the cancer catch up? Or would it take the hint and screw off? Is it receptive? Is it listening? Do we have the power to change it?

The city. Full and buzzy and unaware that somewhere, fifteen blocks south, tiny cells are multiplying in a plot to destroy the whole world.

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

It’s strange the social normalcies we hold strong to, even in the midst of extraordinary circumstances. The rules we are unwilling to break.

He sits forward. I can feel the air molecules around us stiffen.

“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.”

I laugh. The alcohol has made everything loose. I feel the emotions there, right on the surface, not tucked and tidy where I normally keep them.

I feel lonely then, the sensation of which spreads out like a fever, until the whole of my body is afflicted. I shouldn’t.

That stabbing sensation you feel when the curtain is pulled back and what stands before you on the stage is the wide expanse of nothing.

Aldridge said I have a good gut, but I always thought the concept of intuition was bullshit. All you are feeling is an absorption of the facts. You are assessing all the information you have: words, body language, environment, the proximity of your human form to a moving vehicle, and deriving a conclusion. It is not my gut that leads me to sit down at that table knowing what is coming. It is the truth of what is.

The clock on the wall ticks forward. I want to throw it out the window. Stop. Stop moving. Stop marching us forward. Everything terrible lies ahead.

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.

I have been asked if I’ve needed help so many times that I have been allowed to forget the question, the significance of it. I see, now, the way the love in my life has woven into a tapestry that I’ve been blessed enough to get to ignore. But not now, not anymore.

And I do. Of course I do. I was always going to. I fold to him in that apartment like water into a wave. It all feels so fluid, so necessary. Like it’s already happened.

But all of that is an hour from now. Now, on the other side of midnight, we do not yet know what is coming. So be it. So let it be.