In Five Years

The future is the one thing you can count on not abandoning you, kid, he’d said. The future always finds you. Stand still, and it will find you. The way the land just has to run to sea.

—MARIANNE WIGGINS, EVIDENCE OF THINGS UNSEEN

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.

I still go to the chemo appointments, I just don’t go upstairs. I sit in the lobby and read through work emails until I know Bella’s finished

I’m on my second cup of strong and bitter black coffee. I don’t deserve creamer.

David is staring at me with a look I’ve never seen before. He’s looking at me as if he’s already gone.

But you know, Dannie, because it’s in the lymph, it’s really about containment.

“I’m not your project. I’m not some little girl you have to save. You don’t know what’s better for me than I do.”

But Bella has always been one for a project. She loves potential, possibility, an unknown terrain such as this one. The only trouble is she rarely, if ever, sees anything through. I’ve seen her spend obscene amounts of money on projects and renovations that never ultimately come together.

I don’t tell you this stuff a lot, but I want you to know that our relationship isn’t just part of some plan for me. I think you’re extraordinary, and I want to build this life with you. Not because we’re the same but because we fit, and because the more time that goes on the more I cannot imagine my life taking place without you.

That five-year plan I expressed to Aldridge isn’t just mine, it’s ours. We came up with it six months into dating, when it was obvious this thing between us was serious. David will transition out of investment banking and begin working at a hedge fund — more opportunity for big money, less corporate bureaucracy. We didn’t even argue about where we want to live — it’s always been Gramercy for both of us. The rest was a fluid negotiation. We never came to an impasse.