Kat’s Musings

Tag: boyfriend

  • Tastes Like October: A Love Letter to Dairy-Free Pumpkin Spice

    Tastes Like October: A Love Letter to Dairy-Free Pumpkin Spice

    There is a particular stretch of early fall when the light gets thinner, the evenings cool off just enough to justify a sweater dress you do not actually need, and every coffee shop starts smelling like a candle that has opinions. I have, for longer than I usually admit out loud, been extremely susceptible to that smell.

    Autumn valley with pumpkins, spice jars labeled CINNAMON, CLOVES, CLOVER, NUTMEG, and GINGER
    A warm autumn landscape brings together pumpkins, spices, winding paths, and a glowing sunrise.

    Pumpkin spice and I have a long, mostly private relationship. I do not announce it, even though I crave pumpkin pie year round. I do not post the seasonal cup. I just quietly order it, or make it, or accept it when it appears, and feel briefly and uncomplicatedly pleased. My long-distance boyfriend, who has a talent for noticing the things I like and then arranging for them to show up at my door, once sent a small jar of pumpkin spice nut butter. It arrived on an afternoon when he was virtually unavailable to me. I opened it while watching Bridgerton, ate a spoonful with no particular plan, and then, somehow, the jar was empty. I am not proud of the speed. I am also not especially sorry.

    So yes: a bit of a basic bitch, if we are using the technical term. I have made my peace with it. The problem is not the flavor. The problem is the vehicle.

    My stomach and dairy have been on uneasy terms for years. I went years without it, which was fine until it was not. It is just consistent enough that I have stopped testing the boundary for fun. And yet the thing I want, specifically, is a pumpkin spice milk or creamer I can pour into coffee without thinking about it later. Hot girls contain multitudes, including, occasionally, a sensitive gut. This is not news.

    Steaming spiced coffee beside pumpkins, pie, candle, cinnamon, and books
    A steaming spiced coffee, pumpkins, and homemade pie create a warm autumn kitchen scene.

    Which is how I ended up deep in the non-dairy aisle, and then deeper into the internet, looking for something that tastes like October and behaves like it has never met a cow. The one I had my eye on was the Malk pumpkin spice version. It kept appearing in recommendations, looking exactly like the thing I wanted: simple ingredients, the right seasonal notes, no dairy. Every time he went to actually buy it, it was gone. Sold out. Restock date vague. The digital equivalent of a shrug.

    So I am still looking. Something creamy enough to cut coffee, spiced enough to feel intentional, and gentle enough that I do not spend the rest of the day bargaining with my own digestive system. If you have a non-dairy pumpkin spice milk or creamer that has actually earned a permanent spot in your fridge, I would genuinely like to know what it is. The nut butter jar is already a memory. The coffee, is every morning.

    Autumn landscape with pumpkins, winding path, sunset, and labeled spice jars
    A winding autumn path leads through pumpkin fields beneath a glowing sunset, with jars of seasonal spices in the foreground.

  • Bridgerton’s Glossy Fantasy—and Why One Season Was Enough for Me

    Bridgerton’s Glossy Fantasy—and Why One Season Was Enough for Me

    I spent the entire weekend alone—rotting on my chair while my boyfriend was up in Maine. Laptop open, Bridgerton on, snacks within reach, and almost no intention of moving. It was the kind of low-effort weekend that feels indulgent precisely because nothing productive happens.

    Young couple dancing at an ornate Regency-era ballroom gathering
    A young couple shares an elegant dance at a lavish Regency-era ballroom.

    What pulled me in was the surface of the thing. The show sells an upscale world of ladies and gentlemen, drawing rooms, formal calls, gossip columns, and carefully managed reputations. I like that register. The costumes, the houses, the rules of the marriage market, the idea that desire has to move through manners—that is the lifestyle fantasy I actually wanted. Season 1, centered on Daphne Bridgerton and the Duke of Hastings, delivered the version of it I came for: a rake with a reputation, a debutante who is sharper than she looks, and a romance that spends a long time circling the tension before it pays off. That was the sexiest of the storylines to me, and the one I stayed for.

    Open wooden door leading through several dimly lit rooms
    An open wooden door reveals a warmly lit sequence of rooms in an aged interior.

    The rest of the framing was harder to ignore. The series is a Shonda Rhimes production, and it is very woke in the specific way her projects tend to be. The most obvious example is the decision to depict Black characters as royalty and members of the highest aristocracy in a Regency setting, without treating that as a departure from history or even as something the story needs to explain. The show wants the balls, the titles, the inheritance plots, and the social season, but it also wants a modern casting ideology laid over them. Even though the blacks were more likely slaves in the 1800s. Once you notice it, it sits on top of every scene. I was not looking for a lecture about representation inside a costume drama; I was looking for the rake and the love story.

    That is also why I am not continuing. Each season shifts to a different Bridgerton sibling and a new central romance. The Duke’s arc was the one that held my attention, and once it resolved I had no particular reason to stay for the next set of characters. The aesthetic is still pretty, the snacks were still there, and the weekend still passed. Like in life,I do not need another season of the same world once the part I actually wanted is over.

  • Why The Gentlemen’s Chaos Works: Class, Crime and Control

    Why The Gentlemen’s Chaos Works: Class, Crime and Control

    My boyfriend and I just finished The Gentlemen on Netflix, and I owe the show an apology. For the first couple of episodes I was ready to check out. It felt too loud, too messy, and too in love with its own chaos. Drugs moved through country estates like inventory. People got shot, stabbed, or simply erased because someone needed a problem to disappear. I kept waiting for the story to settle, and it refused.

    Abstract estate hedges, roots, and secret pathways

    What changed my mind was not a more subtle plot. It was realizing the noise was the point, and underneath it the show is really about who gets to decide what happens next.

    Eddie Horniman does not want the life he inherits. He wants the title, the land, and a version of family duty that stays polite. Instead he walks into a cannabis operation that has been running under the estate for years, and into Susie Glass, who already knows how the money, the routes, and the threats actually work. The tension is not just aristocrat versus criminal. It is two people who both think they should be in charge, and who keep discovering that control is something you negotiate every time the room changes.

    Brass key, envelope, gloves, and estate documents

    That is what hooked me. The killings stop feeling random once you watch who benefits from them. A death can be a message, a cleanup, or a way to move someone else one step closer to the top. Loyalty gets tested the same way. Family, staff, old friends, and business partners all claim a share of Eddie’s attention, and the show is sharpest when it shows how those claims collide. Susie does not simply tempt him into crime. She treats him like a partner who still has to earn the right to speak. His brother wants status without the work. The people already inside the operation want the new duke to stay useful and stay scared.

    Class sits under all of it. The estate looks like old money and old rules. The business looks like cash, containers, and people who will not wait for a gentleman’s agreement. Eddie keeps trying to translate one world into the other. Sometimes the manners help. Sometimes they are exactly what gets someone killed. I started watching for the set pieces and stayed for the arguments about who owns the risk, who owns the profit, and who gets to walk away clean.

    English country estate at dusk

    By the end I was less interested in the body count and more interested in the bargains. Power in this show is not a single throne. It is a set of levers, and the characters who last are the ones who notice when a lever has moved. Chaotic at the start, yes. Once the power struggles lock into place, it is hard to look away.

  • Just Do It

    Just Do It

    What’s the most spontaneous thing you’ve ever done?

    I believe in spontaneity—flying by the seat of your pants. You feel it. Then you do as Nike says and just do it.

    Empty coastal road at dawn with overnight bag

    There is a particular electricity in deciding before the mind has time to assemble a committee. Before you can overthink. The body knows first. A sudden urge to love someone, take a different road home, to say yes to a last-minute invitation, to start the thing you have been circling for months. Spontaneity is not chaos for its own sake. It is trust that the present moment contains more information than the spreadsheet you made last Tuesday.

    Over-planning has its place. Maps are useful. Budgets matter. But when every decision is pre-approved by fear of looking foolish or wasting time, life flattens into a sequence of safe rehearsals. You end up living a well-organized version of someone else’s idea of a good life. The seat of the pants is less dignified and far more honest. It is the part of you that still remembers how to move before it has justified the movement.

    Branching amber and turquoise light ribbons

    Nike’s slogan works because it is almost insultingly simple. “Just Do It” does not promise a perfect outcome. It does not require a five-year vision board (although I make one every year) or a mood board or a detailed risk assessment. It assumes the feeling is already there and that hesitation is the only remaining obstacle. The phrase is a permission slip to act while the spark is still hot.

    That spark is fragile. Wait long enough and the inner critic arrives with questions: Is this practical? What will people think? What if it fails? By the time those questions are answered, the original impulse has usually cooled into a memory of something you almost did. Spontaneity is a race against that cooling.

    This does not mean every whim deserves obedience. Some impulses are hunger, boredom, or avoidance wearing a costume. The useful distinction is between the cheap thrill and the deeper yes—the one that arrives with certainty rather than a loud craving. You learn the difference by acting often enough to notice the aftermath. Some spontaneous choices leave you lighter. Others teach you what not to do next time. Both are data.

    People who live this way collect stories instead of regrets about missed chances. They remember the night they stayed online and met someone who changed their trajectory. They remember booking the ticket before the price went up and before they talked themselves out of it. They remember starting the project on a Tuesday afternoon because the idea would not leave them alone. The planned life can be admirable. The improvised one tends to be more alive.

    Vintage train platform at twilight with maps

    There is also a humility in it. Flying by the seat of your pants admits you do not have the full picture and that you are willing to find out by moving. Perfectionism pretends otherwise. It waits for certainty that never quite arrives. Spontaneity accepts that some of the best decisions look reckless from the outside and inevitable from the inside.

    So when the feeling comes—clear, uninvited, a little inconvenient sometimes —treat it as information rather than an interruption. You do not need a manifesto. You need a small act of follow-through. Feel it. Then just do it. The rest of your life writes itself after you start moving.

  • I feel at home in his arms.

    I feel at home in his arms.

    What’s a place you visited that felt like home?

    My Red Sox lost in the Wild Card series—on the road to the World Series so let me focus on something else…

    I feel at home in his arms.

    Not the kind of home with the walls all scratched up via my wheelchair or the kind you decorate for the holidays. The kind that arrives after years of being in doorways that never quite opened. When he holds me, the rest of the world does not disappear so much as it loses its sharpness. The noise thins. My shoulders drop. My breath remembers how to land instead of hover. I actually smile. I am not performing calm. I am not bracing for the next disappointment. I am simply there, against him, and that is enough.

    Two winding paths converging beneath a twilight sky

    For a long time I dreamt of a love like this without knowing its shape. I only knew the absence of it. I knew the particular ache of lying awake and feeling too much and not enough at the same time. Anxiety has a way of making a person feel both crowded and abandoned. Loneliness does the same. I spent years searching for someone who could ease that double weight, not by fixing me, but by staying close enough that I no longer had to carry it alone.

    I looked in the usual places and in the desperate ones. I learned how to hope carefully, which is another way of saying I learned how to protect myself with hope. There were nights I cried until my body felt wrung out, not because one particular person had failed me, but because I could not shake the suspicion that I was the problem. That I was too much. That I was not enough. That the kind of love I wanted existed only in stories written for other women.

    Then we met online. I was not searching for anything. Neither was he.

    It did not arrive like fireworks. It arrived like recognition. Conversation after conversation, something in me unclenched. He did not rush to complete me, and I did not have to shrink to be understood. I could tell him about the trembling parts of myself without watching him look for the exit. For the first time in years, the old story began to loosen: the story that said my loneliness was proof of my unworthiness, that my anxiety made me unlovable, that I would always be waiting just outside the warmth.

    I started to believe, slowly and almost against my will, that the long season of crying might actually have an ending.

    When we finally met in person, the body confirmed what the heart had already begun to trust. There is a difference between imagining a person and standing close enough to feel the heat of them. There is a difference between written affection and the moment a hand finds the small of your back and stays there. I had wanted this for so long that part of me expected to freeze, to second-guess it, to ruin it with my own fear. Instead I felt something simpler and more startling: relief.

    Eventually he held me.

    Not as a gesture. Not as a performance. He held me as if he had been waiting for the same thing, as if my body was not a question he needed to solve but a place he already knew how to inhabit. I melted. That is the only honest word for it. The tightness I had worn for years softened. The girl who used to apologize for needing comfort stopped apologizing. In his arms I was not a collection of old wounds trying to look presentable. I was a woman being received.

    Sunlit lived-in room with an open doorway
    He feels like a cozy home.

    Unfortunately, I still know what loneliness feels like. I still know the old reflex of bracing. But now I also know this: there is a kind of love that does not ask you to earn rest. There is a kind of holding that tells the nervous system, at last, you can come down from the watchtower. I dreamt of that love for years. Then I met him. Then he put his arms around me, and for the first time in a long time, I felt like I had arrived.

  • Boston Sports, Delusion, and Why I’m Still All‑In on Drake Maye

    Boston Sports, Delusion, and Why I’m Still All‑In on Drake Maye

    Sometimes I get frustrated with my future and the rate it will get here.

    The kind that sits in your chest on a Monday afternoon when you realize another week has passed and the version of your life you keep picturing still has not shown up. The apartment is not here. The recovery is not quite the there. The relationship, the city, the sense that things are finally lining up—none of it is arriving on the schedule you invented for it when you thought time was something you could negotiate with.

    So I do what a lot of us do when the personal timeline feels stalled: I disappear into Boston sports.

    It used to be the Red Sox. For months this year I lived inside the delusion that they were this close. That one more streak, one more midseason acquisition, one more month would finally deliver the thing I needed from them. I treated this 87-win season like a moral victory and last season’s early playoff exit like a personal betrayal I had somehow earned. That particular brand of hope is exhausting. It requires you to keep rewriting the story every game.

    Lately that same energy has migrated, almost without my permission, to the Patriots.

    Everyone is jumping ship on Drake Maye.

    I see it everywhere. After the 35-6 loss in Jacksonville, the takes arrived: He is broken. The honeymoon is over. Last year’s Super Bowl run was a fluke. The confidence is gone. Bring in someone else. Trade him. Sit him. The usual New England speed-run from “franchise quarterback” to “we’ve seen this movie before.”

    I refuse.

    I watched the same game everyone else watched. I saw the interceptions, the fumbles, the way he stood on the sideline with his hands on his pads looking like he wanted to be anywhere else. I know the numbers this season are ugly. I know A.J. Brown is hurt and the offensive line is banged up and Buffalo is next. I know last year’s version of him—the one who completed 72 percent of his passes and finished second in MVP voting—feels very far away right now.

    None of that changes the fact that I am not getting off the boat.

    This is not sophisticated analysis. This is not a film-study argument about footwork or processing speed. This is just the stubborn part of me that has already invested too much to leave (similar to other parts of my life that I refuse to leave). The same part that used to convince itself the Red Sox were one bounce away. The part that treats sports as a place where loyalty is still allowed to be irrational.

    The crying blotches on my face point to my frustrations.

    They show up at strange times. After a bad loss, yes, but also on ordinary nights when the future I keep waiting for still has not materialized. Sports is supposed to be the escape hatch, the thing that lets you feel something clean and simple for three hours. Instead it has started to feel like another version of the same problem: something you believed in is taking longer than you thought it would, and the people around you are already writing the obituary.

    My heart points toward my unwillingness to let go.

    I do not know if Drake Maye is going to be the guy. I do not know if this season is a slump or a reveal. I do not know if the Patriots are building something durable or just living off last year’s fumes. I only know that I am not ready to treat him the way so many people treated the last few quarterbacks who came through here. I am not ready to perform the public ritual of disappointment on schedule.

    Person standing at 50-yard line in stadium marked “HOME OF THE PHOENIX”
    A solitary figure stands at midfield as stadium lights glow beneath a dramatic evening sky.

    Maybe that is just another delusion. The Red Sox kind. The kind that keeps you coming back even when the evidence is mixed and the wait is longer than advertised.

    But right now, with the future still arriving too slowly and the scoreboard in Jacksonville still ugly, that delusion is the only thing that feels like mine. I am staying. Not because I have a clever argument. Because walking away would feel like giving up on more than a quarterback.

    Football, coffee mug, and folded green blanket on a wooden table beside rainy window
    A football, warm coffee, and folded blanket create a cozy rainy-day retreat by the window.

  • From Doom to Bloom

    From Doom to Bloom

    Instead of doomscrolling, I spend my days BLOOMscrolling—until the day I get to do something.

    Wildflowers beside a city sidewalk as commuters walk past a bus at sunset
    Wildflowers brighten a busy city sidewalk as commuters pass beneath the setting sun.

    I refuse to hand my attention to the negative. Not because I pretend the world is gentle, or because I have never been marked by it. I refuse because attention is not casual. It is an offering. It is a vote. It is the raw material from which a life is assembled, hour after hour, until the hours become a person. I will not feed what I do not wish to grow inside me.

    That is my energy. Vital energy. Not the thin, jittery kind that comes from outrage and endless refresh. The other kind: the kind that still knows how to turn toward light. The kind that notices a sentence that lands cleanly, a color that should not work and somehow does, a stranger’s small mercy, a piece of work made with care. I would rather give my full attention to the positive and the beautiful—not as decoration, not as denial, but as discipline.

    When I say “bloom,” I do not mean flowers. Although those do make me happy. I mean the moment a person, an idea, a day, a skill, a friendship, a room, a future begins to open instead of collapse. I mean the refusal to live as a spectator of wreckage. I mean looking for what is still alive and giving it enough presence to keep living.

    Colorful leafy branches with golden stems rising from glowing blue water
    A luminous tree of jewel-toned leaves emerges from glowing ripples against a deep blue backdrop.

    People often criticize the bloomscrolls. They treat them as proof that I am idle, ornamental, unserious—as if noticing beauty were the opposite of action, as if I were decorating my mind instead of building one. As if I were not already doing something. As if attention itself were not labor. As if keeping the spirit from rotting were a hobby rather than a form of work.

    But I know what it costs to stay open. I know how easy it is to mistake constant reaction for usefulness, and constant despair for depth. Doom has a way of dressing itself up as engagement. It tells you that if you are not consuming the worst of everything, you are not awake. I do not believe that. I believe some of us are gathering strength. I believe some of us are protecting the part of ourselves that will be required later—when there is something to make, to mend, to begin, to carry.

    Bloomscrolling is not innocence. It is a practice. I scroll toward what expands me. Toward what is well-made. Toward what is kind without being weak, and beautiful without being empty. Toward proof that something can still ripen. I collect the evidence that life is not only erosion. I let my mind linger where there is form, color, humor, craft, courage, tenderness, astonishment.

    And I wait—not passively, not as someone hiding—but as someone gathering. Until the day I get to do something. Until the waiting becomes motion. Until attention becomes action. Until the energy I have protected is spent on making, not merely witnessing.

    Until then, I keep choosing the bloom. Not as a slogan. Not as an escape. As a way of staying intact. As a way of remaining capable. As a way of doing the first necessary thing: refusing to go dark before the work even begins.

  • My First Paycheck at 36: Turning a Quiet Hobby into Real Work

    My First Paycheck at 36: Turning a Quiet Hobby into Real Work

    I just got my first paycheck today.

    I’m 36.

    That sentence still feels strange to write. For most of my adult life I assumed a “first paycheck” was something that happened in your early twenties—something you celebrated with cheap champagne and a slightly embarrassing Instagram caption before life moved on. Mine arrived later, after years of personal work that never came with a stub, a deposit, or the quiet little thrill of seeing your name next to a number that someone else decided your time was worth.

    For a time that work was my mother’s spa. I grew up in that space. I learned how to fold towels the exact way she liked them, how to greet a regular by name before they even sat down, how to mix oils so the scent lingered just long enough after a client left. I learned the business side too—inventory, bookings, the particular diplomacy required when someone is unhappy with their facial but does not quite know how to say it. I was good at it. I was useful. And for years that felt like enough.

    It was also, if I am honest, a kind of postponement. Helping her was not just love and duty; it was a way of staying inside a story that already made sense. I had time to achieve my goals (aka perfection). The spa had its own rhythm. My days had a shape. I did not have to answer the question of what I wanted to build.

    The thing I wanted to build started was not a career or a legacy. As a younger woman all I wanted was a beautiful body and excellent grades. I only started writing as a hobby. A place to grieve during my lonely university years. Something I did because it made my brain quiet. I did not treat it like a career. I treated it like oxygen. I practiced. I got better. I shared a little of it with friends. One of those friends runs her sister’s business. During a coffee date, she asked if I could help with the website. I said yes before I had time to talk myself out of it.

    That yes turned into freelance work. The work turned into invoices. And today one of those invoices turned into a paycheck with my name on it.

    It is not a fortune. It does not rewrite the last decade. It does not erase the years I spent pouring energy into someone else’s dream because it was also, in many ways, the family dream. But it is mine. It is proof that the thing I kept doing in the margins—the thing I almost dismissed as “just a hobby”—had weight. That it could travel outside the house. That someone would pay for it.

    I keep thinking about how late this feels and how on time it also feels. Thirty-six is not old. It is also not the age the culture usually hands you a first-paycheck story. I have always been a late bloomer, just look at my first [and only] relationship. There is a particular tenderness in arriving here after you have already learned how to be responsible, how to keep running even when you are tired. The version of me who is cashing this check is not the same person who might have received one at twenty-two. She knows more about endurance. She also knows more about what she is unwilling to abandon.

    I am proud of the years at the spa. I am proud of my mother. I am proud of the part of me that showed up there. And I am proud, in a quieter, newer way, of the part that kept the hobby alive long enough for it to become work.

    Tonight the paycheck is just a number in an account. Tomorrow it will start becoming something else—a little more room to keep going. Mostly it is a marker. A first one. Proof that a passion practiced in the leftover hours can eventually walk out of the leftover hours and stand on its own.

    I’m late, I guess.

    I’m also exactly here.

    A flower-lined stone path winding through a sunlit woodland
    A flower-lined woodland path winds through lush trees toward a warm, sunlit meadow.
  • Wake Me Up When September Ends.

    Wake Me Up When September Ends.

    I miss him in a way that settles into the bones. It is not a passing ache or a fleeting thought that comes and goes with the weather. It is the kind of missing that lives in the quiet hours, in the space between one day and the next, in the moment just after I close my eyes and just before I open them again. I wish more people understood how much it hurts every time I have to kiss him goodbye. Those goodbyes are never casual. They are small ruptures. Each one feels like tearing something tender that has only just begun to knit itself back together. The kiss is soft, familiar, full of everything we cannot say out loud in the time we have, and then it is over, and I am left in the aftermath of it, carrying the weight of the next stretch of distance.

    For many years I lived with an extremely lonely and broken heart. That is not poetry. It is simply what it was. I was miserable in a deep, unshowy way that does not photograph well and does not invite easy comfort. The kind of misery that makes ordinary mornings feel like work. Everyone abandoned me when I got sick. I do not say that for drama. I say it because it happened. People I thought were permanent grew distant, then silent, then gone. Some left because they did not know what to do with illness. Some left because my world became smaller and less convenient. Some left because I changed.

    Yes, I formed my own opinions. I stopped performing the version of myself that made other people comfortable. I became sharper in places, quieter in others, less willing to pretend that everything was fine when it was not. That may have alienated people. I accept that now with less bitterness than I used to. At the time I did not have the purpose or the desire to heal and get better. Healing requires a reason to stay in the fight, and I did not have one. Everything seemed worthless. The future felt like a hallway with no doors. Effort felt pointless. Getting out of bed felt like an argument I kept losing.

    Until now.

    It has been nearly four years since my man and I physically met. Three years before that were full of screens and voices and the strange intimacy of people who know each other’s silences before ever even touching. That number still surprises me when I say it out loud. We have not had the ordinary accumulation of shared rooms, shared meals, shared weather. What we have had instead is his constant support and his steady encouragement. He did not arrive with grand speeches or easy fixes. He stayed. He listened when I had nothing graceful to offer. He reminded me, again and again, that I was not as finished as I believed I was.

    That kind of presence does not transform a life overnight. It works incrementally. A little more willingness to try. A little more belief that effort might not be wasted. A slightly firmer sense that my status in life is not fixed in the place where illness and loneliness left it. I am not writing this from a mountaintop. I am writing it from the middle of the climb, still missing him, still feeling the sting of every goodbye, still carrying the old loneliness in certain rooms of myself. But I am no longer living as if everything is worthless. That shift matters more than I once thought it would.

    I miss him. I will keep missing him until the next time we can close the distance, however briefly. And when that time comes, I will kiss him knowing exactly what it costs to let go afterward. I will do it anyway. Some things are worth the ache.

  • The Year I Would Relive Has Not Happened Yet

    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.

    Open window overlooking a moonlit valley beside a chair with an open book
    An open window reveals a moonlit valley while a cozy chair invites quiet reading.

    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.

    Glowing coral and gold lines converge across a dark blue textured background
    Glowing coral and gold lines converge across a moody blue textured background, evoking movement and inspiration.

    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.

    Wooden chair beside an open window with billowing white curtains
    A vintage chair rests beside an open window as sheer curtains drift in the sunlight.

    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.

    Glowing winding path through dark blue mountains beneath a starry sunrise
    A luminous winding path flows through a dreamlike blue landscape toward the rising sun.

    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.

    Open journal, pen, coffee, and potted plant on a wooden table
    An open journal and fresh coffee create a peaceful, sunlit writing retreat.

    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.

    Winding path through a wildflower meadow at sunrise
    A winding path leads through a flower-filled meadow toward a glowing sunrise.

    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.