F.I.L.F

Prompt: The place where the wall meets the ceiling

For a long time now I’ve been in love with Tomorrow. Crazy in love. I mean, nothing is sexier than Tomorrow. Tomorrow is hot, a downright F.I.L.F. (Future I’d Like to… Feel-up). I’ve always longed to be in her (yeah, I went there) because she holds all the things that get me off: Hope, promise, potential — she’s my ideal everything. A funny thing has happened though as I’ve crept into middle age. It seems that Tomorrow has lost some of her luster. Instead of rock stardom, best-seller authorship, and total self-mastery, the future is starting to look a little more rough around the edges, full of shit like aging, decline, loss. But another funny thing, one that makes reflecting, speculating and reverberating all the more strange, is how falling out of love with Tomorrow has given rise to… er uh, made it incredibly hard to miss… I mean, stiffened my resolve to… Well, let me put it this way: I’m getting a crush on the Here and Now like I haven’t had since like, I sat next to Michelle Dewey in seventh grade homeroom. Shwing!

Anyhoo… It feels like this is how it’s meant to be, this transition of focus from the potential to the actual, although it can be all too easy to fall into the arms of that foul temptress, Yesterday. Maybe it’s because my particular past just isn’t all that exciting, but for whatever reason I am simply not much interested in reliving the good ol’ days. The ol’ days were “okay”, but today is where it’s “all good.”

Of course, this is all a cliché, this be-here-now-live-in-the-moment shtick. What is new, to me at least, is the realization that my love affair with Tomorrow was never really about the future at all, but rather it was about enjoying the feeling—the raw sensations in my body—as hope and wonder and anticipation flowed through me right then and there. It’s like when you tell your first lover that you’ll love her or him forever. It’s not really a promise about how you’ll feel in the future, or at least it’s foolish to look at it that way. It’s much more so an expression of how intense your feelings are in the present, so intense that you use the biggest metaphor you can think of: Fo’evah!

So I’m still down with hoping and dreaming and planning and reminiscing and lamenting and celebrating and enjoying all the sights, sounds and sensations that time traveling has to offer. But I’m enjoying these things all the more because I’m finally recognizing it all for what it all is: My present state of mind, the way I’m feeling right here, right now, in this body, under these stars in this desert sky.

It’s cold outside, the wind whipping the trees in the backyard around hard enough to break branches. Cup of coffee numero dos is buzzing me toward the jitters. A shower, maybe a few songs sung toward that place where the wall meets the ceiling, then dinner with wife and friends.

They say it might snow tomorrow, even in the lowlands.