Dear Future,

I’m dead. Of course, if I wasn’t dead then you couldn’t be reading this letter, so everything works out in the end.

Someone once told me that each second of every day, we die and are born again. Two seconds ago if placed in a maze, you might have chosen door A but now you’re dead and the new you chooses door B. The person who told me about this was me, but now he’s dead.

The trouble with a lot of literature is that it assumes people act differently than normal in extreme circumstances. The thing is, we don’t. Science fiction always had a gee-whiz factor to where you could tell even the future folk are subconsciously impressed with technology. Trouble is life isn’t like that. It is the year two thousand and one; on television we have fighting robots and plans for a game show where the winner goes a space station. Fourty years ago, anyone could have predicted that by now such things would be a foot. What they didn’t count on was that it would be so uneventful. There isn’t anything to it. We live in the future. Big deal. We’re still human beings. Nothing changes that, not even genetic engineering.

When someone was in the seventh grade, he learned about the ancient Sumerians. It seems that they were humans, too. They had kids. The kids went to school. The kids complained about school. The schoolteachers complained about the kids. It was life, the exact same as ever. The person who learned about this was me, but now he’s dead.

You would think time would eventually find a comfortable spot and just rest there... Maybe that's what death is. The constant forward motion seems excessive.

Calvin of and Hobbes used to write letters to his future self. The trouble was he never got a letter back. Life sucks like that. The person best able to help me can’t. It’s too late; I’m dead.

Loyally,

The Present.