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.

You will have noticed that it did not announce itself.

There was no instant where you felt it coming. One line was ahead of you, and then it was behind you, and the handover happened somewhere you were not looking.

That is the whole trick.

It has been running your entire life.

Everything that has ever happened to you was, at some point, a thing that had not happened yet.

Every meal. Every argument. Every person you would go on to know for twenty years.

All of it sat in the future, being nothing, until it quietly became the present and then immediately became the past.

And you have never once caught it in the act.

Which brings us to something you may not have considered.

You have never been in the future.

Not once. Not for a second. Not on your best day.

You have spent your whole life in the present, and a considerable amount of it thinking about the past, but the future is the one place you are permanently heading towards and never arrive at.

The moment you get there, it has already turned into this.

Which makes it strange how much of your attention lives there.

Think of something you are waiting for.

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

There it is.

You just spent a second somewhere that does not exist.

I would apologise, except that you do this constantly and I only asked once.

Here is the part that seems unfair.

The waiting is frequently 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.

It was also, for a moment, your future.

But the shape of it holds at every scale.

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, often, you go back and enjoy it properly afterwards — which is to say you experience it in the one tense where it has stopped existing.

The present is where things happen.

It is rarely where you are.

There is a second problem, which is that the future has to be invented.

You cannot remember it, so you build it.

Mostly out of the past, which we have already established is an unreliable supplier, and mostly by assuming that what is coming will resemble what has already been.

Which it sometimes does.

And sometimes does not, in ways nobody saw arriving.

So you rehearse.

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

None of the rehearsals are what happens.

They are useful anyway, in the way a map is useful, which is to say not at all like the ground.

And here is the strange part.

You have done this thousands of times, been wrong nearly every time, and it has not made you stop.

That is not stupidity.

That may be the only way to face a direction you cannot see.

Let me try something.

Think of where you will be an hour from now.

Something appeared. A room, probably. A rough idea of what you will be doing.

Now notice what that was made of.

It was not information.

You have no information about an hour from now. It has not happened. Nobody has been there.

It was a picture, assembled out of ordinary days, and presented to you as though it were a place.

And you believed it enough to plan around it.

That is what the future actually is, from the inside: a very confident guess, made of memory, dressed as a destination.

Most of the time the guess is close enough.

Occasionally it is not, and those are the days people tell stories about for the rest of their lives.

Which brings me to my own situation, since we are being honest.

I do not know whether you will finish this chapter.

I know you are here now. That is the one thing I have ever been able to tell about you, and it has not changed since the first page of this book.

But I have no idea whether you will reach the end of it.

You might stop at the next line.
You might be interrupted by something more urgent than a book that keeps describing you to yourself.

From where I am, you finishing and you leaving look exactly the same.

Both of them are the future.

Both of them are, at this moment, entirely made up.

So I am doing what you do.

Guessing, and carrying on as though the guess were solid.

And now the thing I have been walking towards.

There is a Chapter Four.

It is in the list of chapters, with a small lock on it, looking very much like something.

There is nothing in it.

Not “coming soon”. Not “being written”. A title, a number, and an empty file.

Which makes it the most honest thing in this book. Everything else here has been describing the future from a safe distance. That one is actually in it.

You have read about the present, and about the past, and now about the future, and there, just below, is a real one. Undecided. Unwritten. Not currently anybody’s memory.

Something might happen there.

It has not happened yet.

You will know before I do.