I believe that relationships will make you the most happy in life. And I don’t mean romantic relationships, though that’s not that bad either. I mean any relationships you create, whether it be family, friends, or more romantic ones. I believe that no matter how terrible your life is or how great it is, the relationships you develop with people over time are the things that will keep you sane and keep you happy.

I can see us in 3 years, me and my mom living in the house of the old man and his wife who she takes care of. We have so much fun by ourselves. When she goes to Good Samaritan (to work as a nurse’s assistant), I’m left at home with the old couple and we’ve developed a wonderful relationship by then, I’m sure. Paula, my sister, is off at an amazing college. I miss her a lot, but it’s bearable because I frequently visit her and Camila, my other sister, in the apartment they share. We’re still incredibly close, and as we get older, the gap between our ages feels like it gets smaller and smaller. Life is good.

These are my mom’s plans for our future. She told me and Paula about them one day after she came home from work. We were doing homework late at night, always waiting till the last minute and never learning our lesson, and my mom was telling us about her day. Then she told us how she’d been thinking about this plan for a while now. After hearing about it, I started to picture what it would be like. It’s nice, envisioning us being older, our lives really starting, and us still being together. It’s easy to picture because I just think about the nice moments we have now, and then I think about a whole lifetime more of them.

In these moments, I’m either with mom, Camila or Paula, or we’re all together. And we might be doing something really fun and exciting like walking around and exploring New York City, or we might be doing something completely mundane like watching tv and laughing at ourselves because, being the lazy people that we are, each of us refuses to get up and shower. In these happy moments, I pause and I watch us from above. And I can see the rest of my life, so clearly, made up of moments just like these. Silly, stupid, exciting, and simple moments spent with the people I love, and if that’s what my future looks like, I’ll be pretty content.

I know that the future is most likely not going to turn out the way I imagine it will. Nothing is ever that straightforward. But I do know that no matter what happens, I’ll still have my sisters and my mom there, and my relationships with them is what matters most. More people will come and go in my life, and I hope some will stay and they’ll be added to what matters most. And we’ll all form a big family with ties of love who share in silly, stupid, exciting, and simple moments. We’ll also share the bad ones, and they will be plentiful, but I plan to pull my loved ones so close that there’ll be no room for anger to worm its nasty way between us. We’ll stumble through life blindly the way everyone does because there’s no way to see where we’re going. But we’ll be holding each other’s hands through it all, and that’s more than enough for me.