Page 186 - In Five Years

I travel the twenty blocks south. She’s on the couch when I get there, not in
bed. She has a colorful bandana on her head and the TV is on, an old rerun of
Seinfeld. Comfort food.
I drop my bag down. I go to her. And then I’m crying. Big, hiccupping sobs.

“Shh,” she says. “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. She runs her hands through my hair, rubs circles over my back. She
hushes and soothes and consoles in the way only she can.
I have held her so many times. After so many breakups and parental
disappointments, but here, now, I feel like I’ve had it backward. I thought I was

her protector. That she was flighty and irresponsible and frivolous. That it was
my job to protect her. That I was the strong one, counterbalancing her weakness,

her whimsy. But I was wrong. I wasn’t the strong one, she was. Because this is
what it feels like—to take a risk, to step out of line, to make decisions not based
on fact but on feeling. 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.”
And it’s not until she says it that I realize I’ve spoken the words out loud. We

stay like this, me in a ball in her lap, her curled over me, for what feels like
hours. We stay long enough to try and capture it, bottle it, and tuck it away. Save
enough of it to last, enough of it for a lifetime.

Love doesn’t require a future.
For a moment in time, we release what is coming.