"Y'know, you should've-"

"I know I should've done this years and years ago, please for the love of all things sacred stop reminding me," I bark at Angela.

"I was going to say you should've brought some dust clothes up here with you but I won't say you're wrong," my eldest daughter corrects.

When Angela arrived at my house twenty minutes ago declaring that today was the day we were going to sort and empty the attic, I did everything I could think of to stall her. I have been putting off this burden of cleaning for so long I was beginning to believe that I may never have to do it. But Angela wouldn't have that and she put her foot down. So I begrudgingly followed her up the ladder and into the storage attic where things go to die.

Angela won't tell you this, but I'm getting up there in age. Her real motivation for rushing this clean out is so she won't have to go through it by herself when I "go into the light" or whatever it is that happens when the day I get called home eventually comes. As an eldest daughter myself, I have always been a little extra protective of our shared tendencies so I finally gave in and agreed to join her in the Great Attic Gutting.

We get to work assessing the hazards that surround us in the dusty space. Angela was right, a rag would be great right now. After fifteen minutes of praying I don't find a dead mouse every time I move an old bag or box, I declare "alright, that's it, I'm going back down to get the rags".

"No, Mom, let me," Angela insists.

"I can still handle the stairs just fine, Angela, my bones haven't turned to ash yet." I argue back trying not to remember how achy my knees have been lately.

"I'm not saying you can't walk up and down the stairs, I just don't want you getting distracted and leaving me up here by myself." Clever girl...

"Fine. You know where they are?" She nods as she's already descending the ladder leaving me in this dusty rat dropping graveyard all alone.

With a more than dramatic sigh, I turn to the next pile I planned to assess and see a trunk I had always hoped would get lost every time I had to move in my younger years. With a healthy dose of disbelief that this trunk is still in one piece, I shove over the pile of old linens sitting on top of it and open the box I used to carry with me to ever circus performance I went to from ages 19 to 26. I easily sorted the long-expired makeup into the trash bags, the clothes that didn't have mouse-bitten holes into the laundry pile to be washed and donated, and nearly gasped when my eyes fell on a discolored and wrinkled four by six card. I was sure I'd lost it or thrown it away decades ago. Yet here it was, face down in my old trunk. Even without being able to see it, I knew who stood with his arms around me in the picture from when I was 20. My hands shook as I reached down to pick it up. As my fingers carefully pinched the edges, I was flooded with memories of the traveling circus and the man I'd met along the way. Nights on the roof of the train cars as we stayed up all night talking after a performance. Days on the train passing the time with card games and re-reading the same traded books since we didn't have the money to buy anything fresh for our small libraries. My Peter making everyone laugh around a fire after even each and every one of our hardest performances. As the images in my head flew by, they morphed into fantasies that never had the chance to be. The house we always dreamed of buying once we'd saved enough money to leave the circus and settle down on a quiet plot of land in South Dakota. The children we'd have running around with their blond curls chasing after them in the wind. His blond hair turning white as we grew old together, still passing the time by playing card games and sharing books.

It was all too much.

I dropped the photo and the attic came back into focus.

The house, the kids, the grey hair, the books. The man. None of it ever came true.

I was further reminded of this as Angela came up the ladder, pushing her long brunette bangs out of her face and passing me a rag.

I slid the photo into the trap door storage compartment in the lid of my old trunk where I'd once hid my savings and turned to the next pile.

I was far too old to spend my days fantasizing about the life I thought I'd wanted when I was in my early twenties. I had lived a beautiful life with three beautiful kids and a husband who loved me but left too soon. I could wish for that dreamworld life until I was blue in the face but that wouldn't change the speed at which life had come at me in those years.

It had been so long since I'd fallen asleep dreaming up a life with Peter, but that night I did. He wasn't My Peter anymore but in the new dream world I created he was. I would be walking down Main Street heading to the bookstore or cafe and he'd come out of the hardware store. He'd nearly run right into me because he never could look where he was walking. We'd lock eyes and in spite of his almost white hair and defined smile lines, I'd know him immediately. And he'd just crack the same goofy grin he was so generous with sending my way when I was twenty-one. He'd say "My Ang" and we'd walk off into the sunset to catch each other up on our lives sitting in a cafe rather than on a circus car roof. We'd get the second chance I had given up on.

But I'd wake up the next day. I would call Angela while I drank my coffee and she'd tell me about her schedule for the day in her final quiet morning moments before her twins woke up just like we did every morning. Maybe Peter was somewhere out there sipping his favored black tea with milk. He wouldn't be sitting across from me at the kitchen table like My Peter would have been. That was a story for a different universe. One where the photo that now sat in the hidden compartment of my trunk instead sat proudly in an ornate frame on our shared mantle in our house in South Dakota.

I wouldn't lose sleep on these dreams. Instead, they'd bring me the greatest sense of peace as I drifted off into quiet oblivion.