Apparently, there’s something called futures trading, which (insofar as I can understand) involves betting on bets in large sums. Gambling is a convenient rhyme for the future as a shiny whirling void fueled by nightmares and possibilities, where our expectations rarely meet it (insofar as I have experienced it). It being the future, hurtling towards us at the end of each word, each sentence, and never arriving to our satisfaction. 

 

     If the future is unknowable, anticipating it is foolish. We live in the perpetual present, only living in the middle of this sentence, and to have access to this imaginary next space is traditionally unlucky. The ancient prophet Cassandra was given the gift of true prophecy in exchange for sex with the god Apollo, an insufferable know-it-all himself. When she refused him, he cursed her so that her hallucinatory prophecies - such as the Trojan war, such as the death of Agamemnon - would never be believed. Cassandra appears still onstage, in portraits, always gaslit and enraged, begging for belief. She was further punished for her insight, and ultimately murdered. 

     You may know of other prophets. Tremors, blindness, addiction, crucifixion, this is what comes for those who have too much access to what hasn’t come yet. 

 

     Those among us not supernaturally cursed with foresight are still bound to make plans; they’re just without certainty. Writing this on Mother’s Day, I’m preoccupied by conception, the ultimate perversion of a present-minded activity to a future-minded one. When people get pregnant, they’re suspended in expectation. But the kid will grow up. The pregnant person can’t know what they’ll produce. Parenting is living perpetually mid-sentence, hoping for satisfaction. That’s more or less life. Daydreaming, trailing off mid-thought due to brain fog or whatever else is a most present state of affairs. 

 

     When I’m forced to consider the future beyond my present breath, I need ritual. Enter the fantasies supplied by parlour games - mapped out by the stars, pulled from the deck, cast from the ancient book. The deck of cards I use offers Cosmic Carrot, Island of Jewels, and Threefold Riddle as possible destinies. The I Ching, which others prefer to still their minds, will tell your fortune through pigs and fishes, maidens and mud. Astrology suggests you find a way to make the centaur, twins and scorpion within you agree to find your reward. Such methods offer fanciful answers to solo scale questions, of conception and execution, feuds and lust. They’re easy to manipulate to our desired outcomes. Oracles offer us peeks into mundane events and relieve our anxiety in a grander fashion than chirpy, prosaic AI ever will. These imagistic fantasies suit the nature of the unknown, and the images themselves tug us back to the present moment. 

     And the death card always comes in the middle of a cycle. 

 

     It could be that the best way to get close to the future is experiencing loss. In the kind of lingering personal absence where we keep seeing our missing person around corners, we live in constant opposition to the past, aware of absence there, where processing that absence requires accepting that life will change. Missing someone takes us out of the present, and painfully reminds us that nothing is relivable. When order is taken away, the present evaporates, leaving a space of imagination we can enter with courage, holding our breath. Trying to configure future in the nothingnesses loss leaves behind is one way to sidestep time. Maybe this is why the prophets in the stories are wounded and suffering - out of recognition that insight is earned down hard roads. 

 

     This experience, finally, takes us beyond the personal scale: losing people, losing languages, losing landmarks, losing landscapes, losing meaning. Of all the many apocalypses that have transpired and those that transpire now, the migrations, innovations, and creativity that have followed have sustained life on this planet. In his introduction to Love After the End: an Anthology of Speculative Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Fiction, Joshua Whitehead wrote of the authors of the collection, “This right here, right now, is a dystopian present. What better way to imagine survivability than to think about how we may flourish into being joyously animated rather than merely alive?” However, other strategies of flourishing he mentions: recollection, continuity, and reemergence, are still more hopeful ways to move through experience, and these are more oriented towards the past and present than the future. 

 

     Often, “futuristic” is used to mean what has just arrived, the last word you heard in the sentence. Yesterday is the back of tomorrow, and if we’re lucky, we can see both sides of that plane at the same time, by holding fast as much as we can in the middle of our thoughts. The future is not now. Only now is now, and most of the time, that’s really all we get. 

 

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