Prefer listening instead?I recorded this one because some essays feel a little different when they’re heard out loud.
When I think about The Future, I personify it.
Because, of course I do.
I give it motives. Personality disorders. Outerwear, even.
Usually I just call him The Future — with a capital T and a capital F — but privately I think his real name might be Klaus.
Which feels correct somehow.
Because Klaus is deeply Germanic in spirit.
Rigid. Punctual. Emotionally withholding. A man who alphabetizes extension cords and experiences joy only once every fiscal quarter.
He believes in systems.
He believes in timelines.
He believes yogurt should expire precisely when yogurt says it expires.
His sense of humor exists somewhere around negative ten degrees.
Sometimes I wake up in the morning, shuffle into the kitchen, my hair looking like I’ve been electrocuted by grief and generic menopause, and there he is in my Mama Bear chair.
Slumped sideways.
Forearm across his forehead.
Looking exhausted by me.
Honestly, he usually looks a little high.
His black turtleneck is always strangling him like he lost a fight with existentialism sometime around 1984.
And weirdly, he doesn’t even look futuristic.
He looks like 1980.
Like he just wandered out of a Devo concert after “Whip It” played seventeen consecutive times and somebody handed him cocaine in a bathroom decorated entirely in black subway tile.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about The Future.
It never actually looks like the future.
It looks like old dreams.
Old versions of yourself that swore they were coming back for you.
And I have known this man before.
Sometimes he arrives wearing different clothes or using a different name — Opportunity, Reinvention, New Chapter Feelings — but it’s always Klaus underneath.
Always standing near the sliding glass door preparing to leave without me.
The Future only ever seems to appear when he’s intoxicated.
Which is probably for the best because sober Klaus would never agree to take me anywhere.
So I hover nearby emotionally refreshing his supply of Jägermeister while casually pitching my escape plan.
Take me with you.
Please.
I can be ready in ten minutes.
And sometimes it works.
Sometimes I catch the sleeve of his coat just before he disappears and suddenly my whole life changes.
A new city.
A new love.
A new version of myself with better lighting, less visceral fat, and more serotonin.
But for the last several years he’s just walked out the sliding glass door without me.
And I stand there staring at the glass like someone whose flight left while she was running down the terminal gate ramp.
For a long time I genuinely believed my real life was about to begin.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
Like at any moment Klaus would pull into the driveway smelling faintly of cigarettes and inevitability and say:
“Get een. Ve are late for your actual existence.”
And apparently I built an entire personality around waiting for that.
I kept treating my current life like a temporary Airbnb.
Emotionally speaking, I still had sheets folded in a suitcase.
I wouldn’t fully unpack myself anywhere because Klaus might arrive at any moment wanting to relocate my soul to a more meaningful zip code.
There were lamps I never unpacked.
Photos I never hung.
Incense I refused to burn because apparently my future emotional stability depended on a reserve stockpile of Kelly & Jones incense sticks.
At one point I found myself saving a beautiful journal “for my real life.”
And I remember standing there in my kitchen thinking:
Well, this is concerning.
Because if this isn’t my real life, then whose life am I currently ruining with stress-induced insomnia, handfuls of SkinnyPop kettle corn washed down with a lukewarm Stella Artois at 11:40 p.m.?
I became a person perpetually standing in the doorway of herself.
Not fully leaving.
Not fully arriving.
Just hovering there emotionally pullin’ a Patrick Swayze, gettin’ all ghosty with Demi Moore at that pottery wheel.
And grief does this to people.
So does divorce.
So does caregiving.
So does survival mode.
Your nervous system quietly starts treating joy like a thing that belongs to other people.
You stop inhabiting your own life because part of you becomes convinced this is just the hard middle section before the movie changes tone.
And maybe that’s why Klaus keeps leaving without me.
Maybe The Future isn’t withholding itself.
Maybe it’s standing there in a black turtleneck watching me refuse to sit down inside the life I already have.
Honestly, that feels exactly like something Klaus would do.
Passive aggressive bastard.
The annoying thing is that lately I think I’m beginning to understand him.
The moments when I feel closest to The Future now are never the dramatic ones.
Not reinvention.
Not transformation.
Not cinematic breakthroughs with swelling orchestral music.
It’s smaller than that.
It’s painting again.
It’s writing things I’m afraid to publish.
It’s laughing with my children so hard I involuntarily blow a snot bubble or pee a little, briefly forgetting every terrible thing that’s ever happened.
It’s buying hydrangeas for my garden.
Burning the incense every damn day if that suits me.
Hanging the photos.
And maybe that’s what The Future has been trying to tell me all along.
Maybe he wasn’t asking me to chase him.
Maybe he was waiting for me to stop standing in the doorway.
Love, Lannie♡
