The Ghosts of Imagined Futures Past

On regression, self-mythology, unfulfilled promises, and learning to let it all go.

Photo by Taylor Leopold on Unsplash

I never moved to Lisbon. I don’t suppose you thought I did, but I got really close. I had to cancel a flight and thus a house-hunt, slated for March 5–14, 2020; I don’t need to tell you why. You were alive on Earth back then. You know what happened.

The past three years were anything but kind to anyone, and thus a grown-ass man waxing on about a dream that died in the covid cauldron, when we all lost so much worse — not the least of which the last flickering of collective quasi-blissful naivete that we could go on living like this and things would work themselves out (but more importantly millions of lives) — reads like your least favorite mope-core indie flick. I will still do it, briefly anyway, because there’s a lesson here, or a catharsis, of sorts, anyway.

Back then, the running narrative in my life was: dude lives in a rented car in a Walmart parking lot, finds salvation at a corporate copywriting job, rides that gig’s stability plus his gift of gab and musical side-hustle to a seven-year bull market that saw his net-worth flip from deep in the red to deep in the black, climbs the social ladder, becomes a community pillar, climbs out of a dark anxious depression, watches his words travel the world, actually travels the world, and finds himself with bit roles in various halls of power and landmark events then hits eject and moves to Europe. It was neat and tidy and satisfying. It was beautiful — the stuff of legends.

That kind of self-mythology only fed upon itself. As the lens got longer and my reach grew wider, I was able to keep writing that narrative for gainful ends. The more I wrote, the more I could live; the more I lived, the more I could write. When the legend became fact, to misquote asshole Hollywood visionary John Ford, the facts themselves became legend. I printed it all.

Then it just stopped. Went out with a whisper — a speeding Ferrari careening over the cliff in total radio silence. It never even crashed. It just sat suspended, descending in no particular direction. Then it disappeared. The car, the cliff, Portugal, the horizon, me.

Too Much Then Nothing At All