This week, I meant to write a crónica about the future. I meant to pull my head out of the past and in order to do so, I was planning. I assembled dates and names to gather friends in August, and bought tickets to fly to an island in March. My head was so full with details that I forgot the past entirely, having left it in December, in a year that vanished last week.
Yesterday I was sketching out mental to-do’s as I put away clean dishes, opening and closing the kitchen cabinets. I was bending over the open dishwasher when suddenly something behind me shattered. I saw nothing, but the sound eclipsed everything else, my thoughts included. I turned around and the floor of the kitchen and the hall and even part of the living room were glittering like ice. The piece had split into so many illegible shards that it took a while to figure out what had fallen: a glass pie dish that I had tucked into a crowded shelf I could barely reach, wedging it on its side as if the dish couldn’t roll. That was last week, and it was still December then — New Year’s Eve. I was impatient, and bent on the coming year. On the future.
Now, however, the future is here, and the neglected past is rolling off the shelf and spreading itself across the floor, demanding my attention. Very well then, I submit. The future will have to wait.
"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
– Joan Didion, "On Keeping A Notebook"
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