Alice Ahearn
Future Perfect
The second-last time you two will ever meet is in an overheated, underpopulated café. Naturally, you do not know then that it is the second-last. You know only that your every word will clatter between the low ceilings and bare floorboards, landing on strangers’ tables for them to pick over with the leftover cake crumbs and cooling tea.
This will make it impossible to speak aloud the things you have come intending to say. And yet the minutes pass and still you are pinned to the unsympathetic oak-laminate chair, fidgeting with the urgent impossibility of leaving the words unsaid.
Saying them will get things back on track, you see. They will bring about the moment you have been circling around for months. The only reason that future is not already the present, surely, is because you have both been too shy to ask.
In the countless years that lie ahead, you will have laughed endlessly together, remembering this exact moment. How hesitantly everything started. To think you could have let yourself even consider risking a lifetime without so much, just because it was too nerve-wracking to speak.
To think you could ever have worried it might turn out otherwise.
There could never have been, for instance, utter desolation. An unmooring so incomprehensible that it might take years to find your way back to shore. You have not been imagining this.
Things have wrecked themselves like that before, but it’s different this time. This is the reassurance you have been clutching like a charm.
You cling to the grounding cold of the table-leg to push away the sense of being suspended, strung too high to fall. All along, there have been definite signs, brushes and nudges and long, wondering looks. Logically, the one way things cannot possibly end is like before.
As a result you have been making excuses.
It would be easy to think things have been coming apart recently. Whenever you have met, it has been easier to speak small nothings than words that matter, words you can build a future from.
It’s probably a good exercise in empathy for you to contrive ways to keep the gaps filled. If the bridges between you seem to be shearing further apart, and the resources to repair them are diminishing, that’s just a chance to get more inventive.
Sometimes it can feel as if you have both let things go unspoken for so long that it will be easier to leave them that way. Eventually you may find you have let yourselves grow so far apart that pulling yourselves back together would snap something. Perhaps it might be wiser to decide, in your inertia, that you’ve already missed your chance. Then it will all have been for nothing.
But that is not what will happen. Resist the temptation to overthink. Remind yourself where it started. Clutch the charm.
The stuffy silence has gone on too long and your face prickles. Somewhere behind you an old man coughs, rustles his newspaper, as if impatient for you to get on with it, but it’s harder than it should be to raise your eyes from the bloated teabag still languishing in your mug. You manage it anyway to steal a glance across the yawning gulf of the small, cluttered table. Something you say makes you both laugh for a moment, and it feels like a reminder.
For all these months you have been a thread of exquisite tension, strung between the memory of that first encounter, where everything started, and a future where every day begins and ends together. It has been affecting the tenses you think in, the way you move through time. Living in this knowledge, of what the past insists you will have, fills you with the joy of already having it. You thrum with the certainty of it.
Getting from one to the other should be easy, an open condition. If you speak, it will happen. You have nothing to worry about. And yet, everything. You will be thankful, looking back, that you were brave enough to speak. Or you will wish you had said nothing at all.
The beginning and end of it is this. By the time you leave this café, you will have determined the form of your future.
Simple, then: ask for it plainly. Speak it into being.
There is a moment, in these situations, that lasts only as long as the time it takes someone not to smile. Things crystallise, then shatter. Half a breath exposes how warped your sight has become, how you managed to turn something as concrete as the present into a thing of your own imagining. You are left with shards and unbearable clarity.
You have wondered since if every stranger in that café heard your world crack.
The stupid thing is that in all the time to come, amid everything you will be unable to forget, what you will not remember is how you said goodbye. Perhaps it wasn’t especially memorable.
It is a strange feeling, grieving something that never was. Time curdles. You live in a looping, uncomprehending instant. The present is a senselessly mangled scribble, where you thought it was a single straight line from past to future. What was going to be is not what is, what will be is what surely would not. It was not, it is not, it will not be.
Yet things continue. Their meaning returns, so gradually as to be almost imperceptible. When you do notice, it’s perhaps because there is something different about the quality of your sight. Eventually, it will occur to you that leaving you to fill the gaps with inventions for so long was a choice. You will wonder how much longer it would have gone on.
The last time you two ever meet is by accident. An absurdly improbable encounter, years later, each on your way somewhere else across a colourless station concourse.
In the meetings you imagined – of course you have been imagining this – you were so vibrantly, defiantly yourself that having forfeited the chance of you would be a regret for anyone. You were unattainable, triumphant.
In fact, you are run ragged by your day, scarcely coherent. The concourse churns with faceless evening crowds. Standing still in the midst of it, you are buffeted again and again by grey streams of hurrying commuters.
It all makes you more conscious than you should be that you don’t appear to best advantage. The conversation moves in fits and starts, unsure where to go. You blunder through so many sentences, desperate to show you’ve moved on, that it probably comes across as if you have a crush.
Perhaps it will show you’re in control of the situation if, this time, you are the first to say goodbye. An automated announcement cuts you off. It’s for your own train, and a hurried half-wave is all you manage before being swept back into the throng.
Afterwards, you wonder if it will always be this easy for the present to knock you back into the past.
It might be the first time you’ve noticed the difference. You are not what you were, and even what you were is not what you had made yourself into. Perhaps it is time for some rebuilding, and for being pleased with the result.
A later time, with someone else, everything is different.
Not for the first time, or the last, you are walking together on the beach. The weather is absurd. Wind flails your salt-stiff hair across your face and your ears sting with the streaming rattle of shingle under the waves. But your hands are warm, clasped together between you. Any others who ventured out are too far away to hear your words. You need leave nothing unsaid.
It is enough. You are bedraggled and runny-nosed and laughing as you stumble together through the shifting pebbles and seeing each other this way is a privilege. ‘Enough’ can be a heartfelt word.
The beginning and end of it is this. Whole futures do not ride on single instants. A future grows from plain sight and solid presence, bumbles and mishaps and hauling each other gleefully back together when the shingle gives way underfoot. Feeling your way towards someone, it turns out, is much easier when you can both make yourselves heard.
When things crystallise, they do not shatter. There are no shards, and clarity is the easiest thing in the world.
Staggering off the beach and out of the seafront gales, you adjust each other’s scarves and head for home. You both have a future to imagine.
Alice Ahearn is a writer of fantasy and other whimsical fiction that explores liminality and small moments of connection, childhood memories and the grief we don't always know how to feel. Her short fiction and creative non-fiction has been published by the British Fantasy Society, Litro magazine, The Short Story, Indie Bites (forthcoming), and others.
She also enjoys translating Latin poetry and writing retellings of Greek myths. She has two translations published by Broadview Press and the journal Ancient Exchanges, and one forthcoming with Bloomsbury.
