In Five Years

by Rebecca Serle

And then he asks me the proverbial question. The one you always prepare for because they always ask: Where do you see yourself in five years?

“Sometimes you have to sacrifice to achieve your dreams.”

“Nothing. You’re just so… ‘sacrifice to achieve your dreams.’ Who talks like that?”

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

For a moment, I don’t remember the future I once saw. I am overcome by the one that is solidly, undeniably present here.

“Poor choice of words,” he says. “We doctors aren’t always the most sensitive. I apologize.”

I change into shorts, a T-shirt, and a sun hat—my Russian Jew skin has never met a sun it particularly got on with—and decide to take a walk on the beach.

“That’s not true. I love David.” “I know you do,” she says. “But you’re not in love with him. You may have been at first, but if you were I never really saw it, and I don’t have the luxury of pretending anymore. And what I realized is that you don’t, either. If there’s a clock ticking toward anything, it should be your happiness.”

I used to think that the present determined the future. That if I worked hard and long, I’d get the things I wanted. The job, the apartment, the life. That the future was simply a mound of clay waiting to be told by the present what form to take. But that isn’t true. It can’t be. Because I did everything right.

“You always tell me I never finish anything,” she says. “I wanted to finish this. For you.”

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.