by Michael Degnan
Halfway through dinner, after laughing at your story about the ponies chasing your dog at the ballfield, he takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, and brings up the thing he has been struggling with at work and in life. It isn’t that the world is going to end, he tells you. There will still be teenage boys nervous to ask out girls. There will still be haikus and water painting.
But some things will be gone, he says, or just harder to find. More and more, fisheries will collapse and crops will fail. Animals like bears and zebras will only exist in zoos. Thousand year-old redwoods will die, not because they’re old, but because they will lack water.
The point, he says, is that change is usually gradual, and sometimes you miss the moment when certain possibilities no longer exist. But this time he is aware. The world that he loves and has worked to protect, the world that he wants your daughter to have thirty or forty years from now is no longer viable. He says he has started to mourn the loss of this future world, this potential world, and he doesn’t know what to do.
He pauses and asks you if this makes sense, if you understand what he’s feeling.
You try to look him in the eyes — you want to focus on those blue eyes that you love so much and you want to be grateful to be with this man who is so thoughtful and cares so much about you, about the world, and most of all, about your daughter, who is home with her grandparents right now playing with her stuffed animals.
But you look at his shirt instead. You’ve never liked this one with its pearl buttons and pointy pockets. It might be okay out in the desert, if that’s home, but it feels wrong in a sushi bar in New England.
And as you do this, as you have been doing more and more these days, you think of Andrew. When he wore this type of shirt, it worked.
You loved the way that Andrew listened to you, not just in the field as you took water samples in polluted rivers or studied grazing patterns, where he wanted your opinion, wanted your guidance. But even at the local hole in the wall, where he would ask you over fries and a High Life about your childhood, about your earliest memories.
You had dreamt about what a lifetime with him would be like, wondering if you would live in the desert or the mountains, wondering if you would have girls or boys.
You remember the moment that the possibility of that future life disintegrated, the day you came back for a book you had forgotten and found him with Laura, who was visiting you from home, both half-naked and wrapped around each other in your bed.
You realize that you should say something to your husband, who is looking at you, ignoring his spicy tuna roll and sake, waiting for your reaction.
Finally, you say that you understand, that you mourn the loss of future possibilities all the time. All you can do, you say, is keep moving forward. You take a sip of water, not sure what else to say, and you wonder if there will ever be a time when you won’t still mourn, when you won’t want to carry the hurt with you.
Michael Degnan lives on an island in Maine. His work has appeared in Maudlin House, Bright Flash Literary Review, Literally Stories, Flash Fiction Magazine, and elsewhere.
Emerge Literary Journal 