Now I write this in a pale town
where excitement is a yellow curb.
My dream awake
leaps through my window
from the highway …

Hoping is so easy.

You haven’t gained a day —
Two self-fulfilling prophecies
who don’t know how to hold each other.

And not that we would ever get away with it”
-Neko Case

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I had a dream a couple weeks ago.

Mom was young and in her wedding dress, sitting on the edge of my bed w me in my childhood bedroom. The room that became Dad’s office in the years before their move out west. In my dream, it still had that wallpaper with the teddy bears in space suits raining upon the surface of the moon.

Being in my first years of marriage still, I’m not sure how I was seeing her. Was I looking at her as dad saw her? As this woman in a beautiful bridal gown, the blushing new wife whose future he was suddenly charged to protect. Or did I identify with her instead? Seeing myself reflected in her trusting gaze at a new husband who was so suddenly tasked with holding her future?

Regardless of who we might see ourselves as at that edge of that bed, I’m not scared of the future. I’m not scared, because I know we will be in it together, equal parts protecting and protected.

Our cumulative four hands carrying a past that is never really the past — it always being right here, right now, walking right beside us into everything yet to come.