If I’m Here a Hundred Years From Now

Tonight the house is three lamps and a cup of tea. The city outside keeps its soft machinery going, and the hallway clock hums like a patient chorus. Andy is in the other room, tinkering with a synth patch that sounds like rain remembering how to be steel. I’m at the kitchen table with a page that refuses to be finished, asking a question I come back to whenever the moon is too bright to ignore: If I’m here a hundred years from now, in what way will that be true?

I don’t mean my bones, or even my name. Names are so good at changing costumes. I mean the pieces of me that can be carried—songs, breath-prints, the way a melody can plant itself in a stranger and flower on a hard day. I think of voices I love from a century ago and how I don’t know their favorite breakfast or the way their hands moved when they laughed. I just know that something in them leaned toward me across time, and I’ve been steadier because of it.

When I’m gone, I want the aftertaste to be gentler than the noise we swim in now. Maybe it’s a chorus someone hums as they cross a bridge. Maybe it’s three lines scribbled in the margin of a paperback, discovered in a thrift store by a kid with chipped nail polish who reads them twice and keeps the book. Maybe it’s the way a room gets quieter for a second, and whoever’s in it doesn’t know why, and then knows.

I think of all the small, ordinary forever-things we leave: the scuff on my guitar where my bracelets tap when I’m nervous. The dress I’ve had hemmed twice and wore the night I nearly didn’t go onstage and then forgot to be afraid. The tea stain shaped like a coastline on the lyric draft that made me realize the bridge needed to be soft, not clever. The recipes that aren’t recipes—just “until it feels like rain.” The freckles on my left wrist that look like Orion, or a map to a town we haven’t visited yet.

And then there’s us—me and Andy—our catalog of almosts and try-agains, the habit of looking at each other during takes to say yes, that’s the take, even if it isn’t. If any future remembers me, I hope it remembers that I was not alone. That there was a hand on the fader that wasn’t mine, a laugh I leaned toward, a shoulder I cried into when the song hurt to sing and deserved to. That the work was a duet even when only one voice was on the record.