Another Life

ANOTHER LIFE

In another life, I am not in a shoebox apartment in Paris. There is no fuzzy music bleeding from my phone propped against a cutting board, no grocery-store herbs bruising green beneath a knife’s edge. Instead, tonight, I will wash the dishes and you will dry. We will unfold the table from the plaster, wedging ourselves into the narrow margins of the room you’ve made a home, and relish our creation.

In another life, we never left home. Fortune helped us find one another long after the fact, ghosting through the wide, empty parking lots where we first learned to drive. We sit and reminisce about summer swims at the manmade lake off the interstate that cuts through the country and the salad bar at the spaghetti restaurant downtown. We build shrines out of places we can never return to, preserving a version of ourselves we no longer know.

But in this life, there is a shared bed and the comforting weight of a borrowed jacket. There is a stool sitting in the sun where our coffee rests while we observe strangers passing by. Dinner is a fresh baguette torn by hand and a cheese that shares a name with our hometown, and our evening entertainment is a reading from the leather-bound journal documenting your early days in France.

Here, there are “goodnights” and “good mornings,” no concept of goodbyes. We know there will be a next time, and a time after that, whether in this city or another. Three years have slipped by, gifting us enough stories to entertain a week. For now, there is the luxury of time. Drag the anecdote out, conjure the theatrics, and stretch the memory until it belongs to us both.

In another life, I am not in a shoebox apartment in Paris. In this one, the table is set, and the walls hold us close.

— C.B. Edwards

Written on 28 September 2026