Falling in Love with the Future by Samantha Marie Gamez

Falling in Love with the Future

By Samantha Marie Gamez

The future and I have had a rocky relationship. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise since we’ve been dealing with each other for as long as I can remember, and anything that old must be a little worn. My mom always says that the younger you start loving someone, the more you go through the aches and pains of growing with each other. It’s a solid thought on relationships and I think it fits here, even if my partner is that slippery concept of tomorrow.

When I was younger, it was infatuation at its best. The future offered me only sweet nothings--countless ideas about how the next day would be better than the one before. Although, in all honesty, it took very little to convince me that good things were just around the corner. By the time I started seriously considering the future, the world had already handed me a nomadic lifestyle, and a double dose of adversity. The kind that comes with being a brown-skinned girl with poor eyesight and a desperate urge to fit in (add to that mix being the new girl ten different times in ten different schools.) So ideas about who I could be habitually drew me into daydreams. In them, future me had no concerns about money, independence, or even confidence. Unfortunately this was no feminist statement of strength and self-love. No. Younger me imagined the future as some big romantic plot and I’d encountered no stories to prove otherwise. From the moment I saw Danny Zuko fall in love with a revamped Sandy and I read how a teen girl could make a vampire with big hair swoon, the future was singular and it was solely composed of being somebody to somebody. Tomorrow I would fall in love and nothing else would matter. If not tomorrow, then the day after.

Needless to say, imagining a future love affair did not make it my reality. Obsessing over stolen glances and hunting for hidden meanings

is fine and dandy in novels, but it leads to little action on the ground. John Green could have very well been talking about me when he wrote:

Thankfully, or luckily, AP courses and extracurriculars made it virtually impossible for me to pine all through high school, and I somehow managed my way to adulthood.

University life was like a cold shower. The intrepid nomad I thought I was had decided to try college abroad (it seemed only logical: to fall in love with a swoon-worthy European man, I needed to be in the vicinity of one). That decision made the future different. Older and more frightening. Lying awake in a foreign room in a foreign land, I couldn’t conjure up the same delicious dreams of destiny. Being apart from my family, having to actually take care of myself… Everything about the present was overwhelming.

As fate would have it, I did fall in love rather quickly, the way eager girls are apt to do, but that turned out to hardly be the stuff of fairy tales. In fact, it was quite the caricature, and it was then that I really started to hate the future. Those early trappings of adulthood and the idea that tomorrow was another day of them made me anxious. If I could, I would have paused everything so I could have a chance to figure out the next thing to do. To figure out how to be a good person when I wasn’t even sure I knew who I was. How to take care of myself when even eating felt like a trial. How to be happy when love suddenly seemed so hard. My affair with the future had hit an all-time low. I hated how fast tomorrow would come and daydreams were more like nightmares-- of loss, of failure, of sadness and anger.

I didn’t want to ever think about tomorrow at that point. If I could, I would bury my head so

“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”

The Girl by the Window (1893) by Edvard Munch

deep under my pillows and stay until time stopped.

It is probably unnecessary to tell you that time did not stop for me. Instead, the days rolled past and the problems stayed the same. Pinterest quotes and New York Times best-selling memoirs warned me about the struggles of adulthood and advised that you just carry on. I doubted that. There must be some big epiphany, some grand moment of enlightenment that would get me out of the woods. I idealised a perfect antidote the same way I once idealised the future.

But the truth was much softer. The truth taught me to take care of myself. From dragging myself to eat when anxiety wanted to keep me in bed to saying goodbye to a long dead romance. I saw and believed that every small step today paves the way for my journey tomorrow. Like anyone after lashing out, I realised that I may have been a bit unfair towards the future. I apologised and let myself see it honestly. Possibilities wordlessly blinked at me like a clear night sky and they seemed to be countless the more I stared. My blood no longer rushed furiously in my ears and my eyes finally adjusted to the contradiction of darkness and brilliance. Then I could focus on patterns, constellations, of what my life could be. I found my favourites, even made some, and in them, I found peace.

I almost lost myself in gorging on the fantasies and then I almost lost myself in the horror of tomorrow. I used to put so much on the idea of tomorrow that I couldn’t fall asleep. But now I can sleep soundly, knowing I’ve built and will keep building my future and will keep building and whatever it brings will be okay.

Possibilities wordlessly blinked at me like a clear night sky and they seemed to be countless the more I stared. My blood no longer rushed furiously in my ears and my eyes finally adjusted to the contradiction of darkness and brilliance. "en I could focus on patterns, constellations, of what my

Aspiration

Adah Isaacs Menken

Poor, impious Soul! that fixes its high hopes

In the dim distance, on a throne of clouds, And from the morning's mist would make the ropes

To draw it up amid acclaim of crowds— Beware! That soaring path is lined with shrouds;

And he who braves it, though of sturdy breath, May meet, half way, the avalanche and death! O poor young Soul!—whose year-devouring glance

Fixes in ecstasy upon a star, Whose feverish brilliance looks a part of earth,

Yet quivers where the feet of angels are, And seems the future crown in realms afar—

Beware! A spark thou art, and dost but see Thine own reflection in Eternity.