May 29, 2012

Dear Future,

I am dead. But that is neither here nor there but then. I hope this letter finds you well, that you have found an answer to plastic. Because my times were fantastic. We stared at screens and sat. And sat and sat. Most everyone was lazy (but we meant well).

I write letters to my children. More small screens but I do print them out and bundle them in boxes. In homage to your dear friend Time I asked family to write Zoey a letter for her first birthday, not to be opened until ages 13 through 21. I assigned them like homework and they arrived sealed. Advice for Zoey when she turns 15 from her grandmother, what her uncle wants her to know at 19, maybe. I don't know what's inside each letter because I did not open them, so they sit in a box, thoughts from 2007 to be read on a day that will make that seem like silly ago. Tomorrow Ozzy turns 1 and we are doing the same for him. For their first birthday I give my children time machines and invite them to travel somewhere ineffable.

Dear Future, thinking about you is like contemplating the size of the universe or the meaning of anything: it’s disturbing and too abstract to comprehend. How entropy only increases. Time and space are much the same, not to mention love. Because tomorrow is like Mars and the year 2030 is Andromeda dressed in a bonnet.

So I wonder. Are they happy? Did I raise my children to know they are loved? Deserve love? To love? Do they remember my voice when I sang, the sound of me saying their names? The feel of my hand rubbing circles on their backs, and do they trace those exact same circles around the silken staccato spines of their own children? How bad does climate change get anyway?

Sorry about that, by the way.

Why can we remember the past but not the future? Who said the arrow in the space-time continuum can only point in one direction? I mean, check me out: yesterday I wrote to the future and here we are! Dear Future, how you scare the shit out of me. I drop these letters like bread crumbs so that I can find my way back, though we have already established that I am dead, so fat lot that does me.

Another thought, another stab at bending the mesh of this manifold: each year I write a letter to my children to be opened on the year that I am. Was. See? That is, this year I turn 40, so I will write a letter to Zoey to be opened on her 40th birthday, to Ozzy on his 40th. Me to my children, mano a mano, if you will, sans reference to combat. One 40 year old to another, despite the fact that I will really be 73 then 78, the numbers adding up to me falling through the years to say hello. How are you?

I was here. This is why I write, I think. More than anything else to just say this:

Love,
S