Dear Future
You have changed yourself - so many times. Even writing to you now I feel embarrassed to admit I do not know who I am really writing to. I have been a fool and thought you were something you were not. I have been naïve enough to assume you were the same you had always been. But if we are balanced in judgment, you have changed across these years, across the lives I have lived.
I knew you once; knew you well enough to catch glimpses of you, and smile at the familiarity of your presence. Like seeing a friend in a mirror in front of you, standing far off to the corner, but knowing that he was there, where you could see him. You were more than that too. You were here. You were close. I could see you in the backyard, and I could smell you after you walked past me in the morning - like freshly milled coffee when the sun rises on a warm day. You were in our house. I could feel you, Future. Close and gentle and (I’m sure it sounds silly) holy. There was something sacred in your beauty. Simple and quiet. As if the very walls were shimmering from what you held within yourself for us. You really were here.
And then you were gone one day. Life came roaring in like a great storm, and I turned to look for you. It was the one day I really needed all your warmth and glow and aroma of promise, and you had gone out the back door. I could almost hear the screen door slam as you ran out.
We looked for you after that - we really did. Thought you might have gone off for just a bit, only to come back with a renewed sense of purpose and direction, like a newly educated graduate. Maybe you needed space to make sense of us, even. But you hadn’t. You had left us, and we were without you so glaringly. Have you seen a house at night with all the lights burnt out except for the eerie streetlight - the sound of its electricity grinding like teeth in the dark? That was what it felt like when you left. I remember calling for you into the frosty night - calling out down the streets, walking from neighborhood to neighborhood, thinking that someone might know where you had gone. We even put up signs on the telephone poles in case maybe you would see them and be struck by how badly we missed you. But somehow we knew that you had gone off to change. You left as something small and unwrinkled and warm. There was no way for you to come back the same way - the world is not that neat.
When you finally did come back, all the things were different. The house had been gutted and sold without you. It was all something completely new, and you yourself were changed. I barely recognized you then. It was as I feared - don’t be offended by it, please. You were a tired, hollow shell of what you had been. There was dark weather under your eyes and hopelessness in your face. There was loss in the way your shoulders were crooked all the time, and there was no more aroma of anything. That was strangest of all - you smelled like nothing anymore, not good or bad. You simply were. And it haunted me for so long, that emptiness of your scent. That was, in fact, your scent: nothingness; emptiness; quiet.
You were so quiet when you came back. I tried to talk to you, to see where you had been and what now you wanted of me. But there was nothing to be said, and nothing that you brought to me now except the darkness that had come to rest under your fingernails and matted in your hair.
This, though, is where I must be very honest with you, Future. It was in these days that I came to dislike you. You were so incredibly not who I had known you to be that I did not know what to make of you, and so I made nothing of you. I made less than nothing of you. I hated you. Deeply.
You were the cracked pillar of all that was, and was now no longer. You were the reminder of the version of you that no longer existed, the way that an empty shell reminds of the life it housed. You were a reminder of change - of your change and how you had become broken and beaten down by the exposure to everything vile. When I looked at you, deep in your dark eyes, I saw only versions of myself I had never known - and I hated them all.
And so I came to resent you. I knew you had come back to the house, and I could feel you in the walls of the place again, but I would set no place for you at the table. There was no room for you in the new build, even if I knew you would come to reside there anyway. I ignored you. I would have nothing to do with you, because quietly and deeply I knew that to do such a thing would be to move on from who you were - to give a nod of approval to the fact that all your wrinkles would never be undone. It ate at me to realize that speaking with you again would be to let go of all the closeness and simplicity and familiarity that you were. That was the worst of it all - that there was another choice to be made, and it the choice of whether you were worth unknowing again so that I might know this version of you now. I was holding it in my own fists - not you, but the version of you I had known, and I knew that it was only sawdust now, and that made me hold it even tighter.
It was not that I was stuck with Past in these moments, unable to look at you. Past has actually done nothing but help me come to this place of better understanding with you. Isn’t that funny - that Past helps me make sense of you? No, it was that I could see you so clearly as you were now, something ragged and gaunt and unwashed, and seeing you only made me back into the corner and grip the sorrow of what you no longer were. That’s what I held, really: the sorrow of what you had ceased to be. And that itself was not bad, but it meant I could hold nothing else in my hands. There was no room for who you were now, only the sweatiness of my palms tightened around the heartbreak of losing your childhood.
What changed, you might be asking? This, too, is where we must be honest. Something indeed has changed, but it is not clear just what yet. I am not yet familiar with this person you have become. Maybe that is because of the atmosphere that you bring to me now. The dust of a dozen roads sits on your skin - I can see it like wood shavings in your hair - and it is not apparent if I must make sense of that grime.
The truth is that I do not know you. For all that I could pretend, it would simply be a lie. How many people look at you in your wrinkled change and say that they are “at peace” with you when really they have no idea what to do with you. It is easy to pretend stoic resolution against things that are hidden in chaotic darkness. But you and I both know that could only last so long - it does not hold up in the late nights of doubt and the long stretches of silence that make up living. No, we ought not feign such congruence between us, Future. You are unknown to me as you are now. You have come back from a world that I have never seen, and now your presence is like a shadow that I cannot trace back to a body.
But this has also made me realize what is much harder to admit: I have never really known you. The construction of you as something young and simple and familiar was only that, a construction of mine. You have never been that, because life is not calculus. It is painting. How could I have known what you would become? Who was I to think that I could see you in all your youth, and claim some ownership of what you must become. It is nearly laughable - certainly to anyone who has walked with you through the years of your maturity. It is not that you were something different than you are now; you always were something that would end up as you are now. It was all there - all that you have become - and I simply couldn’t see it. No one could. No one is supposed to.
And that is what I mean to say to you. You are a foreigner to me, as much as I have tried to learn you. You always have been. Every time I have drawn close to you (or so I thought), or categorized you as something neat and tidy, it has been like gripping sand tighter. You are not known to me. You are not something I can actually see - not the whole of you. But what I know now is that you have always been the same Future, simply growing and shaping into what you are now. How could I love only one version of you when you have always been becoming what you are now. This has always been you. I was simply too unwilling to see that this could be you.
So I intend to do something else. I must, dear Friend, let you go. It is clear to me now. I can no longer call for you in the fog, begging that you wait for me; that you walk where I can see you. I cannot pretend to hold you in my home when you will always be here and then out there and then somewhere else. How silly of me to think that you were of that nature. You are not. You were never meant to be something for me to see clearly.
This sounds like defeat I’m sure, but it is not. You will come back one day, and perhaps you will be something even different from what you are now. In fact, you must be. How could you not become something more than you were before. Time moves and with it do you and I both. What indeed might you become? I am not one to know such a thing; I realize that now. But this is how it was always supposed to be - you were meant to be something given to me, not a thing for me to grip and not let change. What good is a gift if I demand it be only one way? Is it even a gift anymore, or a sick dream of a man who will not let time be Time?
No, I really must let you go from me if I am to find you at all one day - fully grown, and strong, and steady, and quieted in spirit - am I describing you now, or what I might be when we come together again? But that does not mean I will not expect you to come home. The bed will always be freshly made. The place set at dinner every night, with the seat half drawn out in case you come in hungry through the front door. And the lights out front will always be on for you. We’ll be waiting.
He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. -Eccles 3:11
Beautiful, as always.