I close my eyes in response to the blistering Spanish heat and try to remember the next time I’ll be sipping sangria, with the beach at my fingertips and my body kept afloat by the salt in the sea.
It’s not a thing of imagination, thinking about a next time. Everything that will happen is already here and it already happened at some point. Nothing is infinite but there’s an infinite number of ways in which things can happen. Had I prolonged my internship, I would be sitting in an office in Amsterdam, licking at an ice lolly that would melt and make my fingers sticky. I would have commuted back and forth among sweaty businessmen and tourists on their way to their flights, going home or going further into the wide world. My room in Rotterdam would still be full of my crap and I would return, opening the window wider in hopes that it would make sleeping a little bit lighter.
Thinking about the past is thinking about the future, I believe. Everything that happened in the past is bound to happen in the future, too — we humans love repetition, routine. But as often as I might think of trivial moments from the past, I wouldn’t want to relive them, good or bad. Because thinking about the future also means thinking about the past. In his video history of the entire world, I guess, Bill Wurtz says that ‘everything is already here and it probably already happened’. He talks about the creation of the universe, how bold and bright and probably not unique it actually was. ‘I just don’t know where to start’, he continues, backing away slightly from the usual comedic tone he uses, only to come back with ‘and that’s exactly where it started.’
Whatever happens in the future has somehow already happened. And if whoever was present at the time could deal with the surprise or the shock or even the anticipation, then so can I. I take a sip from my sangria and roll over to my back to let the sun warm my belly, right here and now.
