Sometimes, late at night, I imagine the future watching me.
Not judging, not rushing — just waiting.
I can almost see her: Aurenloch, standing there fully formed, calm and certain, as if she’s always existed. She doesn’t ask me to hurry. She just wants me to keep moving, to keep building the bridge between what is and what could be.
I wonder what it will feel like when we finally meet — when the story is printed, the wines are poured, the world begins to see what I’ve been carrying. Will I remember these nights? The half-drunk coffee, the exhaustion, the tiny victories no one clapped for? Or will they dissolve into the myth of “how it all began”?
Maybe she already knows. Maybe every time I doubt myself, she smiles — because she’s seen the ending. She knows that all of this struggle, all of this waiting, was necessary. She knows that patience and pain were the price of truth.
Sometimes I write to her, quietly, as if she can hear me.
I tell her that I’m trying. That I’m tired but still here. That I’m building her out of faith and borrowed time. I tell her that I hope she remembers the hands that shaped her — the friends who believed early, the nights when I almost stopped, the moments when a single sentence felt like salvation.
I think she does. Because some days — in the smallest ways — she speaks back. A conversation that goes well. A design that lands. A phrase that feels right. It’s like the future sending echoes, reminders that I’m walking the right road, even if the destination is still unseen.
One day, she’ll stand on her own.
The world will look at her and call her inevitable.
But I’ll know the truth — that she existed long before the world was ready.
And I’ll smile back across the years, grateful that I didn’t stop.
Because while I was chasing her, she was becoming me.
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