Dear Future

Dear Future,

I’m writing this you from the edge of the Earth’s hemisphere, dangling on the edge of space, held on by only gravity, calling across the oceans of time. With all this technology we have invented I’m just trying to connect.

If you hear me please listen, for this is important.

We need to travel far to reach you, but we do not have enough fuel, or food, and our water is running out. We are not unified in our approach, and even our leaders have lost sight of the goal. We realise we can’t rely upon them anymore, but canyons lie between us, carved by a culture’s amnesia and compounded with history’s blood. We have only just begun to meet each other again. We have not yet solved the equation of the human heart, the one that will connect us to the source and end the horror we have let loose upon the planetary. We have only just learnt what it means to live on one planet. Or should I say, we are still learning.

What can I tell you? We lost ourselves somewhere, and the way home is a labyrinth.

We became aliens on our own planet somewhere along the way. We are only learning what it means to care for country again after generations of fundamentalist fictions. You have to understand, they got lost in their own mythos. Fought over the names of the nameless. Struggled with the riddle of existence. Tossed and turned between divinity and the vacuum. A virus infected entire empires with the hunger of ghosts. Our Gods are merely symbols. Our art is commodity. Our science is a battlefield. At the very least, we understand the theory of evolution - although even that is debatable. But the light never went out…

Our ancestors broke free from the shackles of their upbringing, just as we have done, are doing, will do forever. Is it the destiny of youth to question, sometimes to rebel, sometimes to revolt. Sometimes to start again. Are we doomed to reinvent the wheel with each generation or can we share some wisdom along the way? In the dusty hallways of the world’s brain archives, archeologists uncover communiques written from our ancestors to lead us through the storm. They have provided the maps that allowed us to find you again. We left behind the straitjackets of the asylum, but we lost our traditions in the process, and now we are lost, in uncharted territories - trying to find our way to you.

This is why I’m writing to you now.

For we are just like you.

You are just like we have been.

Can you remember what it was like to be me, when your atoms formed by body, when your breathe filled my lungs? When your blood was still mine, hurtling forwards every moment toward your coastline? We can even see you in the distance, looming on the horizon like a mirage. We can only guess at what you will be like, filling our our dream machines and fiction suits with visions of hope and fear. Our soothsayers are motion pictures, woven with industrial light and magic in high definition, but no one truly knows for sure. You are still unformed in our minds, a mirage on the horizon of our imagination - like a child still pregnant in the womb. We are still working out what to name you. We are arguing amongst ourselves as to who will meet you first. We are making the bed that you will sleep in, preparing the nest that your eggs will hatch, while others burning the soil that you will need to survive.

And we are waiting for you to let us know you are there.

If you are hearing this, please shine a beacon through the fog of this present so we can direct our spaceships toward your safest port, for I am afraid we run out of fuel if we keep going around in circles…

Send me a sign that you are receiving my message.

I’m waiting for your call.