The Year I Would Relive Has Not Happened Yet

If you could relive one year of your life, which one would it be?

The year I would relive has not happened yet.

I keep turning that sentence over in my hand like a stone I found on the beach. Smooth. Heavy. A little warm from being held too long. Most people, when asked which year they would live again, reach backward. The summer they were twenty-two. The winter everything still felt possible. The year before the diagnosis, or the accident, or the slow unfolding of whatever it was that rearranged their life. I understand the impulse. I have my own catalog of almosts and if-onlys. There always seems to be something I would like to change.

I would never do it though.

I say that with the same half-superstitious firmness I use when I knock on wood. Everything happens for a reason. I have repeated the phrase so many times it has worn a groove in me. Some days it feels like wisdom. Other days it feels like a lullaby I repeat so I will not scream. Both can be true at once. The body learns to live with contradictions the way it learns to live with weather.

Still, I froth at the mouth when I envision my future.

Not the glittering, cinematic future. Not the one with applause or sudden wealth or a body that has never known limitation. Just a simple little life. Ordinary in the way sunlight on a kitchen table is ordinary, which is to say: almost unbearable in its tenderness if you look at it long enough.

With him.

The sentence does not need embroidery. With him. The two words sit in the center of the picture like a house with the lights already on. I see the unremarkable days first: grocery lists, the sound of an espresso machine, the particular way someone who loves you says your name when they are only half awake. I see the quieter victories. Getting through a morning without bargaining with pain. Walking a little farther than last month. Laughing at something stupid and not having to pay for it later with exhaustion. A life that does not constantly announce itself as a project of endurance.

And without disability.

I write that last part carefully, because I know how it can sound. I mean the specific, private longing for a version of days that do not require so much translation. Days in which my body is not a burden Days in which the body is not the first negotiation. Days in which “simple” is actually simple.

I froth at the mouth thinking about it. The phrase is ugly and exact. Anticipation that is almost feral. Hope that has teeth. I am not serene about the future. I am hungry for it.

The paradox is that I would not go back and unscrew the past to get there. I would not trade the particular chain of hours that led me to this exact now, even the hours that hurt. Everything happens for a reason is, in my mouth, less a philosophy than a truce. I will not pretend the suffering was decorative. I will also not pretend it was meaningless. Meaning is something we make afterward, with whatever materials we have left.

So the year I would relive is still ahead of me. It has no date yet. It might look, from the outside, almost dull. A rented apartment or a small house. A person I already know how to love. Mornings that do not begin with inventory. Evenings that end without calculation. The ordinary miracle of a body that cooperates more often than it argues.

I want that year so badly I can taste metal.

And if it arrives, I will not spend it wishing I were somewhere else. I will try to live it the first time the way people live the years they later want back: imperfectly, gratefully, with both hands.

The year I would relive has not happened yet.

I am still walking toward it.