A Short History of the Future as Seen by the Present

By T. L. Dias

Something came creeping back to my mind today. A smell greeted my nostrils as I entered Angelo’s Bakery which gave birth to memory and a host of emotions. I was reminded that there was something vague Messianic/Apocalyptic about my conception of the future in my last years of high school. It is a feeling that was elusive but at the same time pervasive. It was a feeling that something both great and terrible but utterly impossible was going to happen. I viewed the future with the same sense of fear and awe that “Primitive Man” must have felt about the “Supernatural”. I both dreaded and eagerly awaited this catastrophic future, this fearful event that would dispel all evil through first achieving hell on earth. I knew that I would eventually have to face my inner demons in a very real, very scary way. I knew that I was losing my brother, Gordon, whose happy-go-lucky manner was transforming into something far darker. I knew all of this but not in any way of which I was fully conscious.

I also thought about love and how there was somebody who I was destined to be with, and I thought I knew who that was. I thought of my destiny. I wanted greatness. At the time it was something that made me very hard on myself as I saw myself as a waste of some great potential. I thought of the people in my history classes, the philosophers mostly, and the thought that ideas can shape history. I wanted very much for this to be my destiny. But I was so incredibly confused as most people are when they are young. The future wasn’t clear but I knew that certain things were inevitable, at least in the back of my mind.

So when I was hospitalized early in 2000 I felt that this “Judgment Day” had come but I could not see how I could ever emerge from it the person I had come to regard with self respect, I know now that while I can never go back to the Age of Innocence that was the time before, being the person I knew to be me evolved from this point with everything that happened and that continues to happen. It was as if I was trapped in a shell and the events of 2000 and 2001 (mental illness, hospitalizations, Gordon’s suicide, etc,)broke me out of that shell, to grow and develop.

I think today about how the future I envisioned came true in a certain sense. It has been a nightmare. It has shaken me to my very foundations such that I can never go back but we are all always already projected forward such that yes, we can’t go back but we carry with us always the past and the changes imprinted on us. I’ve faced some of my worst fears and emerged victorious time after time. I don’t know what the future has in store for me now. I only know that I will face it as I have, and then…then we will see.