If you are not The Future, keep scrolling.

I am in the vape shop parking lot.

Of all the vices, this has got to be the most pathetic. I drink, but not like I used to—I read but not like I used to. I watch videos like everybody else—angrily and in quick succession. 

I cry often, now—really whenever possible. I’m writing to you, future. I’m writing to you so that you know I am very afraid.

I’ve never felt uglier. I’ve never felt fatter, though I weigh the same as I have for the past 5 years. Everyone is very thin now, which makes something in me sit up straighter. 

I miss my mom every minute. I don’t know what makes poetry good anymore.

I watched the election results in the Nashville airport and it felt like I was falling from some place very high. I drank coffee then Prosecco, but I promise I don’t drink like I used to. 

I’m in love, future. I want you to know that, too. 

When we first met I drove him to the laundromat. We watched our clothes spin, contort, sag under their own weight. I decided that the rounded out way he spoke was all I ever wanted. 

He pronounces the T in bouquet and buffet and in his accent he breaks my name into pieces,

like my mom did when I was a kid. 

One, and then the other. Like a song, like a meal in the middle of the day.  

His family folds me into their arms and I feel a part of me soften. I try to hold tightly to this.

I see images of children without heads—hands—bodies—families. For a year we’ve been paralyzed, as we always seem to be, sad in the direction of tragedy—completely unwilling to change.

We keep killing each other, future. I don’t know how we get through this—if we even should. We’re poor and we’re sick and I’m very afraid. I wish I knew what you looked like. 

I hope you’re kind. I hope you’ve saved something—someone. I believe that you want to. 

People say you aren’t coming, that we’ve killed you with all the rest. And maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s why when a CEO is killed on the streets of New York I feel something like hope.

Maybe you shouldn’t come. Maybe I’ll stay here, in the laundromat spinning. Falling fast from some place high. Not at all like I used to be.