Tomorrow is a Place by Sanna Wani

Tomorrow is a Place
Sanna Wani

for Maya

We meet at a coffee shop. So much time has passed and who is time? Who is waiting by the windowsill? We make plans to go to a museum but we go to a bookshop instead. We’re leaning in, learning how to talk to each other again. I say, I’m obsessed with my grief and she says, I’m always in mourning. She laughs and it’s an extension of her body. She laughs and it moves the whole room. I say, My home is an extension of my body and she says, Most days are better with a long walk. The world moves without us—so we tend to a garden, a graveyard, a pot on the windowsill. Death is a comfort because it says, Transform but don’t hurry. There is a tenderness to growing older and we are listening for it. Steadier ways to move through the world and we are learning them. A way to touch your own body. A touch that says, Dig deeper. There, in the ground, there is our memory. I am near enough my roots. Time is my friend. Tomorrow is a place we are together.

MARGINALIA

1.
Some friendships are a return—a small miracle of someone still knowing how your grief sounds when you’re not trying to hide it.

2.
I think of all the places I’ve ever meant to visit with someone, and how often we ended up elsewhere. It’s never about the museum, is it? It’s about the leaning in. The choosing to stay.

3.
There is something holy about a conversation that makes room for mourning without shame, where laughter doesn’t erase the sorrow, but walks beside it.

4.
Time isn’t always cruel. Sometimes she sits beside you in a sunlit corner, lets you speak freely, asks nothing in return.

5.
Today I believe in slow growth. I believe in a kind of love that tends, that waters the parts of us we thought were long gone. Tomorrow is not a deadline. It’s a place I might arrive to, softly, and without any agenda. Tomorrow is a place where I feel possible.