Page 190 - In Five Years

I wander around the apartment, as if in a trance. It’s all exactly the way I
remember. It’s all here. It has all happened.
I turn back to Aaron, standing with his arms crossed in the middle of the
apartment. All at once it appears as if the world is rotating around us. Like we

are the fulcrum and everything, everything is spinning outward from right here,
taking its cues from us, and us alone.

I walk to him. I get close to him, too close. He does not move.
“Why?” I ask.
“She loves you,” he says.
I shake my head. “No,” I say. “Why you?”

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. I got engaged
to David. I stayed away from Aaron. I got Bella to forget about that apartment.

And yet my best friend is lying in bed on the other side of the river, barely eighty
pounds, fighting for her life. And I’m standing here, the very place of my
dreams.

He blinks at me, confused. And then he’s not. And then it’s like he reads the
question there, and I see him uncurl, unfold himself to what I have really asked.
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.
“Dannie,” he says. Just my name. Just the one word.

He touches his lips down to mine, and then we’re kissing and I forget it all,
everything. I am ashamed to admit there is blankness there, in his kiss. Bella, the
apartment, the last five and a half months, the ring that sits on her finger. None

of it plays.
All I can think, feel, is this. This realization of everything that has,
impossibly, turned out to be true.