I spend a lot of time dreaming about the future, which is one of the reasons I keep forgetting to clean the bathroom. You remind me, sharply, but still I’m here on the couch, pondering options. In the future, I tell myself, I’ll get up earlier, pay for everything at the grocery store, and carry all the bags myself. Twice a week I’ll bring home surprises: rented movies, stolen rhododendrons, half-price fruit pies. You’ll arrive to find the bathtub’s been scrubbed with steel wool by me. The whole upstairs will smell of Ajax. Fixtures will glitter like just-thrown confetti, surprising the eye. It’s clear I’ve worked hard:

“Wow,” you’ll say. “Elbow grease.”

Afterwards, it’s August, and we’ll sit outside in lawn chairs, eating corn on the cob in the sun. Just then, in that chair—kernels in my teeth, my heart unknotted at last—I’ll look up to see that the past has amended each simple, destructive mistake. And that everything I didn’t do I’ve done.