We go camping whenever we feel like it and make coffee with water heated over an open fire. We go for hikes in the morning followed by swims in the ocean and come back salty and smiling. We drink beer and eat sausages heaped with caramelized onions and wrapped in tortillas. We talk about moving out here. Just us and this, forever.
You design our home, giving it modern lines and wood floors. We make it cozy with thick old rugs. We fill handmade bookshelves with books and keepsakes from our travels to Peru and Panama and Berlin. We sit on the floor by our fireplace and drink whiskey and talk about our dreams for the future.
We sand and stain the open shelves in the kitchen and fill them with mismatched plates and mugs and those antique glasses we found at the store near where you used to live. Sweet potatoes and lemons and avocados fill bowls. Oils and vinegars crowd the butcher block. Flowers and herbs spill over ceramic vases onto our cool countertops.
Outside the kitchen window: our backyard. Big enough for the studio you build for me to write in and for a lemon tree and a fig tree and a grapefruit tree and a garden. We eat kale stir fries and roasted squash and cucumber salads and sun-warmed tomatoes right off the vine.
Later come children with bare scuffed feet skidding around corners in costumes you make for them. Our skinned-knee kids jump up and down on the couch wearing our soft old t-shirts. They wake us up at night screaming of ghosts, too scared to brave the dark hallway to our room. We take them into bed with us.
We raise them. We grow old together. We have our children and our shared meals and our work and our travels and we never stop telling each other our dreams. One day, we move out here and it’s us and this forever.
I imagined my life with you.
