armada

When I was a kid, I used to have these books. I'd get them from the school library, don't know how or why they had them, tucked away underneath biographies for third graders (who has two thumbs and as a 9 year old reads jfk and winston churchill biographies? this guy!). Most of them were geared as GI Joe books, or books with adventures in them, ie Hardy Boys or Sherlock Holmes, and they were short, very simple books. And they let you decide the fate of the next part of the book. You'd have a series of next steps and then jump to that next section of the book. And so on and so forth and on and on until the end of the book. It was amazing how easy it seemed, how those futures were told so easily and you could literally be in charge of the fate of what happened next. That's empowering for a 9 year old, hell it's empowering for a 28 year old.

Sometimes I wish life was like those little books, know the next steps based on the current action. That we could flip a few pages ahead and cheat, know what the next 5 years brings us, steps closer to something we don't know about yet. Finding the person to spend the rest of your life with, or maybe you have already found them, maybe there are journeys within journeys. Places we have to go to, places that we haven't been before, and that is okay. Those books always felt so magical, that with a few flips back to a page I could rewrite history, or at least the history I was holding in my hands.

Someday, in the future, I will be in a large field, and there will be a wind in my face, and it will travel down and around the contours of my face, and I'll squint from the breeze, tears forming near the edges of my eyes, being blown back. They will fall to the left, because I'll be happy. and you will be there. and so will You. There is a tree behind us, we can hear the wind shift its branches, leaves rubbing together making the noise of a broom sweeping. Your hair will be in your face, I'll wipe it back with my hand, hold your chin, and you'll:

(tell me what's next)