Hope from the Future

If you worry about the coming Friday the 13^th, take heart. For, you see, I have already lived it, and I bring tidings of the future!

The day will be clear, sunny, and cold. You will delight in the company of children. No matter how you worry and fuss over the lessons you are to teach them, they will love you unconditionally. You will sup with second graders, and your heart will swell as they react explosively to the bizarre ways in which you can contort your face.

You will flow through the day like quicksilver, and the day will take you down unexplored paths. To the oubliette at the head of a staircase you’d never fully climbed, where its dusty windows will paint a perfect portrait of forest. Through the seemingly pointless door behind the stage and into halls of memory.

Into that long-lost kindergarten that you thought permanently bricked up. You’ll climb through piles of surplus and cast-offs, shoaled up where the waning currents of the still-active school dropped them: Rusted and dusted tricycles. A decade’s worth of stage props. Old bathrooms with pastel rainbow rows of tiny urinals, their drains fallen to the homes of spiders. And out past them, you’ll discover classrooms empty save for installation-art-like collections of dried driftwood on blue tarps, so bone-like that you have to look twice. And out past these almost empty rooms, you’ll move into those that truly yawn like voids, where not a crayon remains of the long-passed kindergarteners.

You’ll wander further still down these halls, seemingly back through time, until the stuff starts to shoal up again from the other direction, the detritus of the distant past. Artifacts heaped like museum stacks in a distant wing of the school. Huge rusting anchors, leering ceramic masks, and wood so old it’s gone to a cracked and dusty grey. And, at the end of this ancient wing, in a building that—from the outside—seemed only half this size, you’ll find yet another door. You won’t open it, though, electing to head back rather than chancing a fall further down this rabbit hole in time.

On your return, as you pass through that first door behind the stage—out of memory and back into the waking world, you’ll be picked up by students with the simplest of “nikorasu: come”s. You won’t know where they’re going, but you’ll know it’s somewhere you want to be as they’ll be carrying graduated cylinders straight out of science fiction. In their class, they’ll present you dried stalks of rice, and they’ll show you how to strip the grains from the grass and into your waiting hand. It will seem a profoundly ritualistic practice. It will be the kind of thing you don’t want to rush least you should spoil the beauty of it. Stalk after stalk, the roughness of the grains will build a callus on your index finger, and as you cup the kernels in your palm, their fine, hard filaments will prick like thorns.

Your pile of harvested grains will grow before you on the newsprint, silver-brown, and you’ll think of that art exhibit where the world’s population was represented in grains of rice. From the vantage point of this painstaking labour, where every grain is birthed from its stalk by your fingers, that metaphor won’t seem so far fetched. And when you take that small pile into your cupped hands and pour it away into the graduated cylinder—a beggar going backwards—they’ll slide like liquid and tinkle like rain on the clear plastic walls.

This will be your Friday, just as surely as it was already mine. But it’s getting closer to Saturday here now, so I’ll get back to working while you sleep, and I’ll continue sending you the sun.