Wishful Thinking

Let the lottery ticket be the one. Let the diet start Monday, and let Monday be postponed indefinitely, for weather. Let the meeting be an email, the email a typo, let there be leftovers when I get home. Let the ex be composing, even now, the apology of the century. Let my hair reconsider.

Small stuff. Paper boats we fold out of wanting and push out onto the water.

But we both know the other kind. The 3 a.m. arithmetic of hospital corridors: take the house, take the savings, take my hands, I wasn't using them for anything. The wish to unsay one sentence. To have stayed ten more minutes. To hear one particular voice say any word at all, again.

Those we do not speak out loud. We just look up. And the stars, for the record, are fires — enormous, ancient, indifferent — and they do not take requests.

But before you turn from the window, this: somewhere behind you in time, a younger you — red-eyed on a stairwell, certain that nothing would ever work out — is wishing, with everything they have, for one ordinary evening exactly like this one. A kitchen. A lamp. A voice in the next room. Nothing burning but the dinner.

You are what became of all that wishing. Walk through the rooms of your life and count: granted, granted, granted.