It was dark when we rushed to the hospital. The waiting room was ice, and your hands were ice, and my insides were frost. Tears flowed like a stream down your face, from an eye that wouldn’t close. Half your face wasn’t moving.

We didn’t know what was happening. I tried to give you warmth I didn’t feel. “Let’s go somewhere when you get better,” I said. “Let’s go to New Zealand.” You’d dreamed of going, but Aotearoa had always been out of reach. Someday, I’d thought. But how many more somedays would we have?

It was Bell’s Palsy, a condition that causes facial paralysis. It has no known cause, no known cure. Just time. It took you six months to recover. When you finally smiled with both sides of your face, I thought we were done, and I locked my promise away.

I’m being practical, I thought. The little money we’d saved was a safe we’d built against uncertainty.

(Where do deferred dreams go when we bury them under maybes and somedays? I imagined a quiet room at the end of my life, filled with unopened boxes named later. What would I find if I looked inside?)

“You promised,” you reminded me. I didn’t say no, but I didn’t say yes. “You promised,” you whispered. “I know,” I did the math and kept quiet. “You promised,” you said, not with anger, but like somebody who’d waited in a room longer than she should have.

So I bought the tickets. The locks cracked. The numbers broke.

The first town in New Zealand was grey, dusty and drab. Fog between the mountains, hiding the peaks. I sat in the motel, wondering if we should have come.

But then we drove deeper into the country and the fog began to lift. We drank from cold rivers. We rested in the deep valleys. We walked amongst ancient trees. Somewhere between the mountains, fear began to loosen its grip.

One afternoon, the sun set a field ablaze with golden light. You sang to me and I was brought back to life. Your hair was aflame and your eyes were aflame and your voice was a flame.

What had I been afraid of? What was the cost of a locked life? What had I understood in the hospital room that I’d forgotten?

I thought your eye wouldn’t shut, but it was mine that refused to open. I thought I’d promised you a visit to the land of the long white cloud, but I was really promising to not let fear speak louder than love. I thought New Zealand was the gift. But the truth is: you were the gift all along.