We’ll split a cab away from that city you love and watch the honey-churn of working bodies call it home and home and home until they finally believe it. When the thunder blooms heaviest you’ll tell me how you grew up—whether the sun was at full mast over your suburb or the river was boiled off to make way for your street. It was good. Not so good that I’d get stuck, but good enough that I was ready when I left. In six months, you’ll light a candle in the new apartment and tell me to blow it out like a birthday cake. In many ways, this is a birthday. I’ll want to tell you that welcoming ourselves into this future means that I will archive every day from now on. That I am tumbling with you, endlessly, into the brightest fortune imaginable, and I am not scared one bit. Instead I’ll say I love you, and you’ll understand. It’ll grow dark and we’ll fall asleep on the floor, fresh rain outside the window, with that city you love still in sight. Go ahead, take your vows. We’re home.

___

Munira Tabassum Ahmed is a writer with work in The Lifted Brow, Cordite, Runway Journal, Australian Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She is the co-editor of Hyades Magazine.