Future Selves
—
Yavuz Altun
A FEW DAYS AFTER THE EARTHQUAKE, my future self showed up. Twenty years older than me, clad in a suit but devastated by the loss of his wife. The woman I would fall in love with someday. I’ve never been good at comforting people so I mostly listened, afraid to say something wrong.
Not knowing how much time we had, we perched on a park bench. He was looking around like a child, soothing his nostalgia by recognizing familiar faces, places and signs, rambling about things as they drifted through his mind.
He had no idea why he’d come to the past at all. “I was at the funeral,” he said, “saw a crack in the air, like a tear in the glass. And I felt this strong urge to look inside.” No direction, no instruction, no promise.
“I’ve never felt this helpless in my life,” he said, and then collapsed into sudden tears.
This man in agony was me, no doubt, except for a receding hairline. He knew intimate details of my life and his account of the next twenty years in broad strokes was nothing surprising. Still, part of me denied the whole thing, probably as a way to protect my sanity.
Though, he refused some of my questions, not out of obligation, but instinct. As if he knew what was the right thing to do in such situations.
In the end he said there was an opening in the air only he could see. We hugged goodbye. Holding my older body was unsettling. It was like gazing at the stars on a clear summer night, if I kept looking long enough I would be pulled into them. Later, he walked away and disappeared.
The next few days, I walked around the city, taking pictures of damaged buildings, bent streetlights, and tents erected by citizens too afraid to sleep in their own apartments. I saw dozens of people talking with their future selves, laughing, weeping, shaking. They were much more affected than me. But the trace of disbelief was there.
The city seemed unhinged. We now knew how the future would unfold, or at least we thought we did. But this knowledge didn’t bring new opportunities as one would expect, nobody asked for the lottery numbers or future business trends. Instead, this peculiar phenomenon cracked open the vaults of melancholy in people.
“Well, nobody got any wiser, if you’d ask me,” my mom told me. She was one of the many left waiting for a visitor from the future.
One morning, I saw my future wife crying near the canal. I knew she was the one because of that gravitational pull. I sat close to her and started checking the photos I took. Tears kept falling from her eyes and we said nothing for a while.
“Look,” I said, showing a random shot to her, “this is you with your future self.” Seeing two totally unrelated old ladies in the photo, she snorted.
“Don’t worry,” I told her, “we’ll have enough time.” •
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Yavuz Altun is a Turkish-born writer living in the Netherlands. A former journalist and longtime blogger, his work has appeared in The Bangalore Review and The Nifty Lit.
Not knowing how much time we had, we perched on a park bench. He was looking around like a child, soothing his nostalgia by recognizing familiar faces, places and signs, rambling about things as they drifted through his mind.
He had no idea why he’d come to the past at all. “I was at the funeral,” he said, “saw a crack in the air, like a tear in the glass. And I felt this strong urge to look inside.” No direction, no instruction, no promise.
“I’ve never felt this helpless in my life,” he said, and then collapsed into sudden tears.
This man in agony was me, no doubt, except for a receding hairline. He knew intimate details of my life and his account of the next twenty years in broad strokes was nothing surprising. Still, part of me denied the whole thing, probably as a way to protect my sanity.
Though, he refused some of my questions, not out of obligation, but instinct. As if he knew what was the right thing to do in such situations.
In the end he said there was an opening in the air only he could see. We hugged goodbye. Holding my older body was unsettling. It was like gazing at the stars on a clear summer night, if I kept looking long enough I would be pulled into them. Later, he walked away and disappeared.
The next few days, I walked around the city, taking pictures of damaged buildings, bent streetlights, and tents erected by citizens too afraid to sleep in their own apartments. I saw dozens of people talking with their future selves, laughing, weeping, shaking. They were much more affected than me. But the trace of disbelief was there.
The city seemed unhinged. We now knew how the future would unfold, or at least we thought we did. But this knowledge didn’t bring new opportunities as one would expect, nobody asked for the lottery numbers or future business trends. Instead, this peculiar phenomenon cracked open the vaults of melancholy in people.
“Well, nobody got any wiser, if you’d ask me,” my mom told me. She was one of the many left waiting for a visitor from the future.
One morning, I saw my future wife crying near the canal. I knew she was the one because of that gravitational pull. I sat close to her and started checking the photos I took. Tears kept falling from her eyes and we said nothing for a while.
“Look,” I said, showing a random shot to her, “this is you with your future self.” Seeing two totally unrelated old ladies in the photo, she snorted.
“Don’t worry,” I told her, “we’ll have enough time.” •
Yavuz Altun is a Turkish-born writer living in the Netherlands. A former journalist and longtime blogger, his work has appeared in The Bangalore Review and The Nifty Lit.