Living Backwards in Time

I've lived my life backwards. Or at least with a time arrow at a complete right angle to everyone else, anyway. People ask me questions about seemingly serious things all the time, but for me, for some reason, the questions aren't really questions. What they're asking about, whether they will be okay, whether their children will grow up to be good or bad, or will rebel and get worse in their teenage years, or whether the organization will thrive even with indifferent leadership, or any of a billion others that are really the same question that isn't a question at all still is strange to me, even after this much time.

I've lived their future. I know how their stories end. I've lived a million lives, died a million deaths, seen a trillion people born, live, die, and be born again. When I say that you'll be fine, it's true. When I say that you will get better if you do one thing differently, you will. When I say your daughter may grow up to be a bit slutty, but will still be absolutely brilliant, even though now she's only 9, or 11, or maybe is already a teenager and already is a bit slutty, she'll still be brilliant. She already is. You've already succeeded. Whatever you want to be better at, you've already mastered.

It's almost easier to give people bad news. People seem to at least be relieved to know that by not making that one change, or by changing the one thing they're doing right that matters, or by trying too hard at the wrong things, or to control the wrong people, they will fail, people are relieved. They take comfort in the certainty of their demise, their looming drawn-out fall from grace already attained, the snatching of utter defeat from total victory, of knowing that their children will die alone, in a pool of vomit in a jail cell after burning out on speed after dropping out of gradeschool, these things comfort people.

I can't lie. Well, I can, but with tremendous effort and practice. I have to rehearse the lies I tell. And they are as transparent to people as people's futures are to me. But when I don't lie, which is pretty much always, people so very badly want me to have lied, and they want me to have lied by giving them the worst news instead of the best.

You will be fine. All of you. Your mother is incredibly unfair, but you know that, and you're brilliant and will grow into accepting it, and you're already so incredibly gifted, talented, beautiful, all the way through. You succeeded before you were born. Or before you die. I can never tell anymore. Language captures non-linear time badly.

Your daughter is very strong. You can see it in the pictures on your desk. They aren't fake framed photos that came with a gaudy piece of shit with plexiglass covering it to hide the soft, pulpy cardboard back. They are of someone very real, who has already lived a wonderful life, and who will die happy, surrounded by family who love her.

You can't be fired. You are untouchable. Your group will go where you lead them. It already has. You've already made them great. It's in the past for me.

But no words can persuade people of the beauty of their future. Only tragedy means anything. But most of you don't have any harsh tragedy in your futures. Only complete success, beauty, love, happiness. And you can't accept it, even though you want it. You only want prophecies of imminent and abject horror, of death, of doom.

That's the only real tragedy.