By Patrick Sagaram

We are lying in bed, smoking and talking about going off to live in a foreign city – New York, or Madrid, places we travelled to before, where we'd spent hours at the museum or just sitting in cafés, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. We'll never ever quit, we tell ourselves. It's early June, the sun like a wolf and we've got the windows pushed wide open, the voices of elderly folk talking loudly downstairs along the row of provision shops are carried into our flat. Recently married, we moved into this old estate six months ago, this flat we got for a song as our friends were buying up property by stretching their mortgages. We don't have very much furniture – sofa, coffee table and a portable stereo – because we always wanted to be ready to move one day our decision to live simply and remain childfree makes it a possibility but at the moment things are nicely in place. In the evening our friends will come over there will be laughter and loud conversation, pink wine, cigarette smoke and Coltrane, our weekends always ending the way it begins, both of us in bed, our bodies pressed together.

We do not know it yet but a year from now the first child will arrive taking us by surprise and this will change things. The cigarettes will be first to go, followed by the drinking and late nights, a slow fading away from our friends. It can't be helped, we tell ourselves as we swap all these things for precious time with our son. Two years will pass before our daughter is born and another child brings more joy but it also means we have to move – not to any foreign city like we had planned – but to a shiny new apartment not much bigger than what we own but we have the pool and gym and all the nice things we didn't have before except what we have less is each other, both of us nearing the end of our rope.

One day, you will come back late from work. Your eyes are moist, red and your hair is tousled. You will sit me down at the kitchen table, hold my hand and say things you cannot find words for exactly but I get the picture. I feel the ground beneath give way, a strange loosening in my body. 

All this will happen, leaving us to question what we had before, that early optimism and hope about our future. This morning, though, drenched in sunlight and sweat, the possibilities seem endless. At one point, a breeze will blow and you will take my hand and the both of us will go to the window, arms draped around each other and see the clouds overhead gathering into something heavy, something big and feel the wind in our faces, as if bracing for what is yet to come.

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