Future Tense

A life measured in scans and conditional verbs

Last week, my writing group prompted us to write about ten things we had lost. This is one of mine.

Future Tense

My professional life was conducted almost entirely in the future tense. At the UN, nearly every document was about what someone would or should do next. The Security Council decides that member states shall. The mission will deploy. The parties are urged to.

I spent weeks negotiating verbs: the distance between shall and should, between will and may. Each carried a different degree of commitment. One-year mandates renewed again and again. Five-year frameworks. Agendas named for years I assumed I would see.

I could put a year into a sentence without flinching.

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I also spent years of my life inside Mandarin, a language with no future tense. Verbs do not conjugate; nothing in the verb itself tells you when. After the verb tables of other languages, this felt like a relief: no endings to memorize, nothing to get wrong.

Time has to be carried on other words: tomorrow, next month, soon. 明天我去. Míngtiān wǒ qù. Tomorrow I go. The verb stays the same. Tomorrow does the work.

I liked that the verb made no promise.

I did not know what I was practicing.

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Five years ago, I was told my future would probably be short.

Here is what I have lost instead. Not the future. The tense.

My grammar has rearranged itself. The infusion is Wednesday. The scan is in August. If the treatment holds, I might travel. What I rarely say now is next year. Or When this is over. Or Eventually. Someday.

Someday. I used to love that word. I don’t remember when I stopped using it.

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For the first time, I could plan nearly all of my future. A short future is a small one.

I prepared my son for my absence. I put my affairs in order. I gathered my philanthropy into a fund. I signed the do-not-resuscitate order. I wrote down what I wanted at my deathbed. I cleared out files and shared my passwords. I chose where I would prefer to die, if I have a say. Every decision had the same grammar. After.

My death is the most organized project I have ever run.

My life is the part I cannot organize.

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The ending I prepared for did not arrive. Nothing was cured. The disease stayed and kept moving. What came instead was a long middle with no dependable horizon.

But tomorrow keeps appearing on the calendar.

So now I speak about time the way Mandarin does: in the present tense, with time placed beside it. The infusion every other Wednesday. Houston every month. Every stable scan gives me another six weeks before we look again. That is the nearest thing to a future tense I am issued.

Mostly I rely on the conditional. If the scan is good. If the treatment works. If the weather cooperates.

A friend is driving across Australia right now to live in the Kimberley. When we talk, she conjugates freely: she will fix up the house, buy a camper van, foster a dog, find a new job… The words themselves are ordinary. I cannot remember what that certainty feels like.

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Darya and Luna do not appear to think far ahead.

Darya came home from a shelter in December weighing less than five pounds. Luna arrived in May, also underweight and sick. Neither of them has plans. They have the sunbeam, the birds at the window, and the weight of their bodies against my side.

They do not spend today rehearsing tomorrow.

I watch them. Now I know what I am practicing.

On Mondays during the school year, I teach yoga to small children in the Bronx. One day, a girl stood in tree pose with one foot pressed against her ankle and her arms above her head.

“Next year I’ll be in second grade,” she said. “And I’ll do a headstand.”

She wobbled as she said it.

Children speak constantly in the future tense. When I’m big. Next summer. On my birthday. They say these things as though what comes next is simply theirs.

Next school year she may try the headstand she promised herself. She will fall, laugh, and already be talking about third grade.

I no longer say next year.

I say: if I am here, Monday in the Bronx.

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