“The future is hypothetical and should be treated with caution.” 

–Yiyun Li

     WITH CAUTION, THEN, LET US PROCEED: I’d like to believe the future is a better place to be, but sometimes, often really, life makes it difficult to feel so, both on a macro and a micro level, the macro being what we call this wide world we are meant to be taking care of, a world not only becoming increasingly inhospitable to us, but untenable too, though this state of affairs is nothing profound, or new, nothing to write home about in any case, if you have a home to begin with, or someone to write to even, or have enough energy at the end of the day to sit down and exert the effort to attempt to translate the events of your life into language that seeks to represent unrepresentable things, constrained by one’s ever-shortening attention span and the physical limit of the page, for these are how all times have passed, everything so unbalanced and without any sign it is going to be set straight any time soon, or that, at the end of the day, at the very last second, the good guy might swoop in and save the day, that the good guy might win, as they do in one of those shows my curious nephew watches with rapt attention, since he likes that every episode comes with a story, and he’s not old enough for me to tell him that he might grow up not liking stories at all, that the supposed function that conventional narratives serves will eventually lose its luster, but in any case, he asks us to tell him stories all the time, when he’s eating and right before he goes to bed time, and its never clear if he understands everything but he does like the act of listening, of paying attention to us trying to charm him, in fact my goal is to always provide him with an overwealth of information, a deluge of words, so that he sort of becomes stoned by my procession of language—kind of like what you’re doing right now, she thinks—but all I know is that telling stories keeps him from asking an endless barrage of whys for which why not is not a sufficient response, and, so, like Scherezade before me, I become involved with anticipating the many ways I might extend the present tense of my narration without losing the natural rhythm of things or slipping up and revealing to him that I do not know what I’m doing, which is how I spend most of my life, meaning that it is only in this particular state that I have to have in mind, the whole time, the future of the sentence, which stems from the moment I decide who the protagonist will be, which, for my nephew’s pleasure, is usually a person who closely resmebles him or a talking animal who lives a place known to him who find themselves in archetypal sort of story they teach in schools where someone wants something and they run into trouble having it, but, sometimes, when all of the elements seem to align, and I can muster up the energy from the stresses in the micro aspects of my life—since I have, up until now, neglected to explore the other side of my purposed equation, for one must get lost in order that that one might be found, but this you already knew, or at least that is how I chose to live, without a map or a compass or a sense of where the path, like the sentence, might lead—I try to deviate from the expected route and teach my nephew a lesson, one that is important for him to learn at his age, which says something like this: that usually what you want is not a state of affairs that you will ever attain, that there are certain things that are impossible in this life not matter what they tell you, that what we talk about when we talk about suffering is that we brush up against the limits of an experience whose walls seem to repel us, and it is the force of that repelling that wounds the soul, in fact it is the source of the wounds within all of us, which will never be healed, and should they be, there will be no more purpose to life, because happiness is a lie that suffering’s truth always eclipses, but luckily in the stories I tell my nephew before he goes to bed, I try to demonstrate to him that, instead of what you supposedly want, the world seems to always provide you something other than what you wanted in return, so that if what you wanted is a future, what you will receive is a future that is not that future, the, let’s say, not-future that I would like to call the simple future, ironically titled because the future is anything but simple, in fact it will be hard, very hard, because everything on the micro level will be designed to detain you from even entertaining the macro, for the macro is always something that exists outside of yourself and is unequivocally not you but reflects something inside of you, a mirror of sorts, since mirrors are something we will always be attracted to, addicted, we are, to seeing ourselves in a surface of things, but that also feels like such a normative way of thinking, a trap of a life that prematurely ends the sentence, for what we should always seek, each of us, and what I try to make my nephew seek, is to attend to the things that do not reject you, but that present themselves to you and you can freely, unabashedly throw yourself into like ponds of viney feelings and mossy thoughts and feral being, where you do not necessarily belong but have found yourself in because you have something in common with your surroudings, which, according to the Dictionary of Untranslatables, is the only requirement necessary to begin creating a community, a mere commonality, for the future is just a room that we have never been in and I don’t believe it doesn’t exist yet, or, at least, that is not a thought I want to take into consideration, for what life and literature always tells us is that the future is made up of the stuff of the past, meaning that the bricks to build it already exist somehwere, but it is up to us to look hard enough, intentionally enough to locate them and start building ensemble, as a collective act of remembering a thing that other un-normal people have left behind, like a castle made out of a community of teeth, a yellow brick road turned yellow brick house, the future a mausoleum of ghostly utterances, and like they commonly say, can’t both things be true at once, that the future can swallow all of these things, that all the things that I do not want will be caught in the sieve of time, will be detained at the customs of my consciousness, for no matter how far I wish to fan out towards hope, I know that my present circumstances will not remain the way that they are right now, that loss is always around the corner, which it only takes a sick family member for you to realize, when all the possibility in your life drains out and you don’t know what to do or where to go or who to turn to, on the cusp of someone else’s death, tasked with being a beacon of hope, and it is then that I have to think that the future is a better place to be, that even if nothing works out the way we divined it, it is better than being in the present, for in a sense, to show up to the present is a sign of the future, to make these words diffuse in the air like a perfume whose redolence may or may not sit well with you, or for long, but will have been sensed nonetheless, because you submitted yourself to it the way that you submit to your life, and when was the last time you fought back from it all, when you acted out and carried out a pure, unthinking gesture, this sense that rather than the present and the past, the simple future is the product of the macro and the micro, the community and the artist, the person and their wound, the storyteller and the child not quite wanting to go to bed yet, it is a dialogue that sneaks through the back door, a fugitive, fleeing thing, forever on-the-move and on-the-run, a rabbit in a race against time thinking that the future is a better place to be: but there’s no need to worry about all this right now, really, because we have finally arrived at the end of the sentence, and it’s time for you to go to bed.

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