peering into the future

notes on what creates next reality

I’m in the Uber tonight pensively staring out the window while mentally composing this Substack while staring out at the snowy sidewalks of Manhattan zooming by, and I’m wondering how I got here and I’m thinking about the simple idea that, many moons ago while sitting on the roof of a Hollywood mansion in sunny Los Angeles, I would’ve never been able to fathom the life I have now and the cast of characters and all the things that have happened in the last year, even.

Even though my heart aches tonight and yearning ceases me, I am also aware of the inverse of yearning — that this moment I have right now was one I once yearned for, that the future back then is the moment of right now, that the problems I have are precisely the ones I wanted to manifest so many years ago. That gives me a bittersweet mix of melancholy and deep awestruck gratitude.

What’s frustrating though is realizing that, as of late, I’ve stopped believing the past defines the present, but more like the future actually defines the present. This paradigm shift is disorienting as I’ve let go more and more of the person I used to be, even though I’m distantly nostalgic for the familiarity of my innocence that also held onto that past.

How can this shift manifest now? Simply put — the future is a conglomeration of hopes and dreams that are already in your imagination, in your consciousness, things that can power through even the most densest of horrors that live in your psyche, and all in all they funnel straight into the energy of the choices you’re making at this very moment.

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When I was little and I was trapped in a moment I could not control, I would physically squirm and literally cry, wringing my hands, as if I could somehow tear away the bindings I felt when I was imprisoned in circumstances and feelings that were unbearable. I eventually learned to disassociate into the next reality over, one intimately connected linearly to this one, where I heard a distant voice always thunder to me, survive this moment, and this is a promise, that the future will be easier.

The fact that I barely remember how much I did this is a testament to how I am living in this promised future, now, yet paradoxically also living in the good ol’ days. When experiencing the deepest of sadnesses, I acknowledge that they are traces of back when I had even less hope for the better things to come, and I also see how one day I will long for these moments that I felt such intense feelings. Because maybe the future won’t hold as many intense sadnesses, but thus be also lacking of intense happinesses and joys in the same way that rays of sunlight break over the horizon when we see a new dawn.

The moment I live in now currently is so much more beautiful and bearable than the pain of the past, yet it is also striking that it is full of unrecoverable intensity that will perhaps fade into the distance once this moment fades into “the future.” I wish I could leap over the fences of forces that be and peer into the next moments, the ones in which I’ve processed more emotions, seen more happenings, understood more of this horrifyingly beautiful grandiose earth we live in.

I feel myself lately flashing back to the past less, and flashing forward to the future more. However, it is murky and unclear what shape it will take overall, even while bits and pieces come forward with striking clarity. You see the friends you know you’ll have forever, the lovers whose journey you’re excited to see transform, the things you wanted coming to fruition or losing their chokehold on you.

That future I am trying to grasp is no longer marked by the promise of it being “easier,” because it doesn’t need to be, but it’s also going to be simpler, and something of how the complexity being stripped away manifests then as yearning for something you will no longer have makes me hang onto the pain of right now. Sometimes pain is what colors life into vivid detail, forces you to reflect, and prompts you to also see more clearly. For what else would you have to contrast joy with then?

I think the greatest thing I have to look forward to, that defines right now, is how much I don’t know yet. Much less how much I haven’t experienced yet. That promise defines my current excitement. I wonder how I’ll feel once I have those. I hope I never run out of ways to make my present state a beautiful, glistening, beacon of hope for myself and others and all of the people I still want to love.

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On Thursday as we sat on the couch side by side searching for things to talk about you told me about how your ex’s father died recently. I had barely grasped her existence, and in addition to processing everything else about us, I found myself later looking him up because for some reason I found myself caring about who he was almost more than I even cared about her. Which was confusing.I read his obituary and balked at how vividly his personality came through. By the time I went to look at his Facebook, I was struck by grief myself for how every single day, someone is losing another person full of life like that.

He was such a nice man, a picture emerging of what a father should be like. It’s kind of creepy that the last video he took was of him peering into the camera smiling at the future that he saw in front of him before a car hit him.

As I sit here after my party typing this out on my Substack, I can’t help but wonder how often he peered into his own future, in a reality far far away where he could have grown old enough to see his daughter have her own family, how often anyone does that and assumes their life will continue. At the same time the future defines the present, what if it’s also just an illusion, for surely if I were to never wake up tomorrow morning, I could safely say from the grave that that future I tried to look into was completely unreliably false.

These are dark thoughts, yet it’s so beautiful how fragilely wrong I could be about that future, that the dreams I dream could never come to fruition and the people I love could leave my life whether literally by the maker himself or also by loss and circumstance and trauma and distance. It is crazy to remember that there is no guarantee that any of this will matter even in 24 hours. It is beautiful, then, to not cling to what the status quo has been, and instead let yourself melt into what you do not in fact know, but can loosely fancy believing in instead.

What crosses time and space is simply knowing I have any mental ability to fathom, take a deep breath in, and understand that irrespective of what grief, wonder, curiosity, fascination, and gratitude I can experience, there is so much more I know now than I did yesterday and so much more I do not know yet, that I can glimpse forward will soon mark what I will say tomorrow.