CURA.

Since returning to my childhood town—a phrase that crumples under its own nostalgia like a dying star—I’ve had the kind of dreams that announce themselves as dreams only after waking. At night, I inhabit old houses where the drywall remembers me. You’re back, they say, or rather, someone says it in a tone the house agrees with. The dream makes sense in the way dreams always do: people blur into places that once resembled people, and places into vague atmospheres. The logic of the dream remains intact: identities blur, geographies become emotional states, architecture inheriting affect.

Sometimes I’m walking through the tall black mustard, its flowering stalks swaying in some algorithmic breeze. Fennel. Swallowtails. This must be spring, but it also feels like fire season. The hills pulse with a kind of ancestral frequency. Locals only, they whisper, or shout. We grew here / you flew here. It’s petty and profound. I laugh in the dream and then wake up, unsure whether I’m complicit.

Nine months now, away. Time has that elastic quality it only achieves under duress or enchantment. Could be a year. Could be forever. I drink something called “adaptogen” and taste bright red fruits engineered to suggest survival, subtle florals meant to mimic optimism. The future, everyone says, is uncertain, as though the past had ever offered any real clarity.

We had 23 minutes to remake our life. And we did. Which is to say: we didn’t panic, we packed. The hard drives—those small repositories of everything—went into the duffel in under five. Important documents, favorite paintings off the walls with a practiced grace, as if we’d done it before in another life. My son was crying. My son is practicing swimming.

“Apéritif.” I hear the train in the distance and the waves in closer proximity. The senses are a surround sound system now. The fog rolls in with an authority I respect. The islands reappear. Or I remember they’re there. The future is misty. The future is cortisol maxed out, a 10/10 on the invisible metric we all pretend not to measure. The future is also peace. It can be both. It can be neither. I’m tired of binaries, even as I dream in them.

In the future, my sons are swimming.
In the future, they are still boys.
In the future, they are dolphin-shaped shadows,
gliding through liquid data, barely touching time.
In the future, they echo.
Not human, not animal—just something remembered in the shape of love.
In the future, they are shimmering outlines—code dressed in memory, miracles flickering just offshore.
The future is my family.
The future is your family
The future is sparkling, terrifying sunshine. The future is ecstatic.
The ocean doesn’t arrive, it remains.
I can almost see it.