You're not going to believe what I am about to tell you. I don't mind. In fact, it's probably for the best if you don't believe me. It'll make your life a lot simpler.

I can tell the future.

See?

I can already feel you casting your doubt, just as I've cast mine countless times. But all the disbelief in the world cannot alter the fact that were you to ask me, I could tell you exactly how some aspect of your life is going to resolve.

There are boundaries, of course. There are so many variables, so many possible unfoldings of the universe, that is becomes impossible to see anything accurate past a certain distance. A year and half is about as far as I can reasonably reach, and at that point the best I can do is present two options. It will either happen this way or it will happen that way. Anything beyond that and the multiple choice gets too vague to really be of any use to anyone.

I would prefer it if you didn't believe I can see your future. A very few of my friends do, but they are the ones who know me inside and out, knew me before I was me, and never doubt. Only one of my friends, my muggle friends, ever believed me. I told him his future regularly. Then, one day, he asked me a hard question, a far question, one that would not resolve itself for a year and a half. Because I loved him, I reached, and I told him how it would end -- either this way, or that way. For a long time, it looked as though I was wrong, and though he never said anything, I knew he was angry. After the situation fell in place and one of those two possibilities did come to be, he asked me again if I could really tell the future. I refused to answer him. It seemed like a stupid question. Not long after he stopped speaking to me altogether.

I don't often tell people the futures I reach anymore, though if I am asked directly I will answer. I love my friends and can deny them little, but since the future is always strange and never easy, it is better for you all to continue not to believe me. You probably don't want to know.

I often, however, reach into my own future. The older I get, and the better I know myself, the further I can reach and the easier it becomes. It's still difficult for me to process and accept, so I often ignore my own prescience (and at my own peril). Sometimes the future is too difficult and painful for me to properly see (since I cannot imagine it). Sometimes I flatly refuse to believe what I see because for all that I am I can be very stubborn. And sometimes I stop looking entirely because I'd rather not know. I'd rather cover my eyes and hope I miss the scary bits.

So I have to get sneaky with myself. The best way that I have found to talk to myself about anything, though especially the future, is through my notebooks. I always have one on me, and I am forever jotting down lines of poetry and doodling and keeping a pseudo-journal of thoughts and smells and memories and complaints. So when something occurs to my deep, powerful, future-sensing mind, it tends to get folded in to whatever I am writing at the time. Scrying amid the scribbling.

It can take some time for these love letters from the past about the future to finally reach me. But inevitably I'll be looking for an early draft of a piece or a phone number I wrote down, and suddenly find myself winded, sucker punched in the gut by a future that is already clearer that it was when I first called it out.

I say all of this so I can tell you one small thing: something is happening. The day that everything came undone a year and a quarter ago, I saw the future ahead of me more clearly than I ever have before. This future was warm, light hitting a white stucco wall on a late, fat summer afternoon. This future was easy in a way that things only are after you've fought for them longer and harder than you believed you were capable of. This future was a cup running over, and now I feel like the first drops have finally dropped down on parched lips.

I will tell you more when I can. I would tell you everything now, and how it is going to resolve. I would happily tell you the future. But you wouldn't believe me. And soon, I will have forgotten again too. We'll both just have to find out as time slowly unfolds at its own pace.

I don't mind. After all, the woods are lovely, dark and deep.

Labels: Magic

Dos!

-- Eat all the delicious, free food offered to you regardless of the meat content or calorie count. You need those precious nutrients for the long winter ahead.

-- Make sure you have an awesome friend who will invite you to drink beer and hang out on her family's dock into the small hours.

-- Spend at least one night at your little brother's kickass new apartment playing Harry Potter: the Trivia Game.

-- Steal your neighbour's wireless internet. They're nice; the probably don't mind.

-- Bring a flask. That way, the line "This man whan to die for his country; OBLIGE HIM" is even more awesome than you could have imagined.

Don'ts!

-- Do not watch more than four hours of true crime documentaries with Harry Walschots, lest you find yourself in a heated conversation about blood spatter and ballistics.

-- Do not engage in debates with surly former schoolmates who now work at the local Walmart. It is so tempting to try and rescue them but it will only make you crazy.

-- Don't believe your sadistic parents when they try to convince you that you've slept in past 4pm. It's barely noon.

Labels: Family and Friends