Not Yet

A moment ago, this chapter had not happened.
Now it is happening.
You are the one doing it.

Chapter Two finished by pointing at the future and then declining to go there, which was either restraint or cowardice. Here we are anyway.

One line was ahead of you, and then it was behind you. The handover is easy to miss when you’re busy reading what the line says.

It’s been happening your entire life. Every meal. Every argument. Every person you would go on to know for twenty years. There was a time before each of them, when you had no memory of what would happen.

Some you saw coming. Others didn’t even have the decency to let you finish breakfast.

You’ve never been in the future. Not once. Not for a second. Not on your best day.

You’ve spent your whole life in the present, with plenty of time spent thinking about the past. But the future is the one place you’re always heading towards and never quite arrive at. The moment you get there, it has turned into this.

And yet it gets a remarkable amount of your attention.

Think of something you’re waiting for.

It doesn’t have to matter. A meal. A message. A Friday. A conversation you’re dreading. Some vague better arrangement of your life that begins on a Monday.

Perhaps just thinking of it changes how this moment feels. The message hasn’t arrived, but you may already be reaching for your phone.

I only mentioned it. You’ll have to take the rest up with whoever hasn’t replied.

The waiting is often longer than the thing.

We ran into this in Chapter One, in a joke about a sentence that was announced in advance and then turned out to be three words long. You may not remember that. It was a while ago, and it was also, for a moment, your future.

You spend a week looking forward to an evening. You spend the evening waiting for one particular hour of it. The hour arrives, behaves like an hour, and leaves.

And then, sometimes, you enjoy it more afterwards, when there’s nothing left to arrange and no need to check whether everyone is having a good time.

The evening has finished. You’re finally free to be there.

Of course, you can’t remember the future, so you improvise.

Mostly out of the past, which we’ve already established is an unreliable supplier. You assume that what’s coming will resemble what has already been. Often it does, just enough to keep you making plans.

So you rehearse. You run the conversation before you have it. You picture the room before you enter it. You plan the sentence you’ll say and then say a different one.

The rehearsal can be useful. It gives you somewhere to start. The other person may still wander off in a direction you hadn’t prepared for, taking your excellent next sentence with them.

You adjust, and later you rehearse something else. It may be the best way you’ve found to face a direction you can’t see.

Think of where you’ll be an hour from now.

You might picture a familiar room, or simply have a rough idea of what you’ll be doing. Perhaps you have an appointment and know exactly which chair you’ll be waiting in.

There are good reasons to expect some things. You know your plans and the shape of an ordinary day. But the hour itself hasn’t arrived to confirm the details.

Meanwhile, the version you’re imagining can be quite convincing. You may already feel impatient with the queue, or relieved to be home. Whatever is around you now has had to share your attention with a place you haven’t reached.

A guess made of memory can feel remarkably like a destination.

I have a small version of this problem myself: I don’t know whether you’ll finish this chapter.

You’re here now. You might stop at the next line, or be interrupted by something more urgent than a book that keeps describing you to yourself. From here, I can imagine either ending. You haven’t supplied one yet.

Still, I’ve written the next page on the assumption that somebody will reach it. This is what passes for optimism among books.

Chapter Four is next in the list. What do you think is waiting there?

You can keep your answer to yourself, too. I seem to have managed most of this conversation without one.

There is a Chapter Four. For a while, it was a title with a small lock on it. If you were here then, that was where the book stopped.

Now there are words in it. Something that was only a possibility when this chapter was written has become a place you can go next.

If you expected another chapter, the book has finally met a reasonable expectation. If you expected a trick, I wouldn’t rule it out. I know who’s doing the talking.

Its title is still the same: Still Here. What you imagine from that title may bear very little resemblance to what you find. The words are already waiting; your encounter with them has yet to happen.

That’s as far ahead as I can take you from this page. You’ll have to bring the next one into the present yourself.