You drew me a picture of us in the future. Our houses were next door to each other & a white picket fence separated our property & oh god, it made me curl into a ball & ache for hours. See, in a perfect world, the clouds would always be fluffy & our mailboxes would always be full of hand-drawn pictures & our smiles would be lopsided but permanent. We both want to name our sons Isaac & neither of us paint our fingernails. We have the same middle name & we finish each other's sentences. Sometimes people tell us that we are the same person - the only difference is that you're terminally ill & I'm just terminally guilty. We are smoke rings in the dark, soap bubbles on the lip of the water. We are bright eyes & shy fingers touching through the veil of introductions. We are racing side by side down separate book aisles, not calling out to one another but comforted in the echo of each others' pulse. We are strangers who aren't strange to one another at all, promises scrawled in folded pieces of paper, slipped under door cracks in the middle of the night.