In Five Years

by Rebecca Serle

Her parents’ bank account is large and easily accessible, but their time and attention are not.

This is what I’ve always wanted. To be somewhere that stops at nothing. To be surrounded by the pace and rhythm of greatness.

I wouldn’t say I’m a romantic, exactly. But I believe in romance, which is to say, I believe in calling to inquire about a date instead of texting, and flowers after sex, and Frank Sinatra at an engagement. And New York City in December.

That is the thing about relationships: it’s not necessary to say everything.

It’s 2025, a man I’ve never met is my boyfriend, and I live in Brooklyn.

God help me, I let him hold me.

“I know,” I say. “But I’m your best friend. I have to say it anyway.”

I don’t think I realize, living in New York, how much light and noise pollution affect my day-to-day life.

New York kind of makes you feel like it’s the only place in existence.”

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

“You really want this,” I say, but it’s not really to her. It’s to the wall. To whatever beyond has brought forth this reality.

It’s always a million different reasons that all say the same thing.

I have the feeling that I do not want to understand; I just want him to cease speaking. If he stops speaking, none of it is true.

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?

It’s so stupid, impossible even, that my brain still relays this information to me now, still notes it—the missing feet of a porcelain tub. As if it matters.

In New York you never know what is water and what is urine.

The wind picks up, dancing the leaves and trash into a veritable ballet. I start to cry.

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

It feels wrong here, that sound of joy.

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

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

They don’t want to make decisions about her care, not really. And so I will. I always have.

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

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.

But I am hopeful, of course I am. I’m breathing.

This is what marriage is, I know. Tiffs and comfortability, miscommunications and long stretches of silence. Years and years of support and care and imperfection.

She knows now that what’s to come is hers to face alone. I can’t take this part from her, I can’t even share it.

And whatever he has to say, I’m not interested in hearing.

She notices me noticing.

“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.”

He didn’t seem to have any of the hang-ups older brothers usually have about their little sisters. We fought, sure, but I always knew he loved me, that he wanted me around.

She talks with her eyes.

feel the emotions there, right on the surface, not tucked and tidy where I normally keep them.

“You are not wrong for loving what you do,” he says. “You are lucky. Life doesn’t hand everyone a passion in their profession; you and I won that round.”

I’ve always been waiting, haven’t I? For tragedy to show up once again on my doorstep. Evil that blindsides. And what is cancer if not that? If not the manifestation of everything I’ve spent my life trying to ward off. But Bella. It should have been me.

We were, weren’t we? An arm’s length away? If you can reach out and hold the other person’s hand, does the distance matter? Is simply being able to see someone valuable?

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. I sit.

I feel it in my body. It punches me right there, right on the tender underside.

He sits back. He tosses his napkin onto the table. The proverbial towel.

“It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay.” She’s wrong, of course. Nothing is okay. But it feels so good to be comforted by her now.

What could happen to her under my watch? What bad thing could touch her if I never, ever looked away?

She is my mother. She will help. That is what she does.