In Five Years

by Rebecca Serle

No one who has lost a sibling at twelve can say with a straight face: everything happens for a reason.

I sidestep around a puddle of liquid on the sidewalk. In New York you never know what is water and what is urine.

“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 used to think I could never live in Los Angeles. It was for people who couldn’t make it in New York. The easy way out. Moving would mean admitting that you had been wrong. That everything you’d said about New York: that there was nowhere else in the world to live, that the winters didn’t bother you, that carrying four grocery bags back home in the pouring rain or hailing snow wasn’t an inconvenience. That having your own car was, in fact, your dream. That life wasn’t, isn’t, hard. But there is so much space out here. It feels like there is room—to not have to store every single piece of off-season clothing under your bed. Maybe even to make a mistake.