2016-05-06 - 10:38 p.m.
#"Everyone's talkin about the future. Everyone's fuckin' afraid of it.":
I was briefly thinking about my dream life and realized too much of it is soon to be real.
Soon, as in September, my world will be torn apart and this next year, as in the winter of 2016 and spring of 2017, my new world will be created.
Maia and I are building a house with my parents. We are tearing down 1040 and building a new 1040. We are planting apples trees and installing solar panels and building a green roof and getting a dog (and a cat); these are dreams.
The fruit trees will grow and in some years (5 or 6), fruit will fall and we'll make pies and I'll make cider. Maia will have a studio in the back yard; Cassie and I will have an office. We'll grow rhubarb and I'll trade for honey to make mead and maybe our cherry tree will produce enough fruit each year for a batch of wine.
This is dream stuff.
My parents will live with us (kind of) in the basement suite. We'll make dinner together sometimes, maybe. They'll walk our dog and we can hang out, or not. It'll be a different life, I'm sure of it.
It's exciting and daunting and different to think about. It feels a lot like establishing a new chapter in my life, setting the foundations of our future. It's a strange and serious project but also so exciting and awesome. I feel like it means a lot but is also just a normal progression of Maia and my arc. This is how our life goes.
The strangest thing about it all is how much it provokes thoughts of death and change. My parents, I know, will someday pass. My grandma is in that place now—the dying place. She lives but she lives in a dying way. My parents are very much alive right now, but not like Maia and I, not like they were when they were our age. Their age is a part of their life in a way that our age is not a part of ours.
I think about this new house and this life as the life I am choosing to die into. Which is maybe too premature to even think about but it's my inclination to think that far ahead. I know what this is. I am choosing this life for my future self. I am thinking of where Maia and I will want to be in fifty years and in fifty years we may be dying. I know that's a part of this.
It's not so bad to think of Maia and I growing old here, living our life here, of sharing this life with friends and family in this place. These are happy thoughts, mostly. To think of my life is to think of my past and my future, to be present in myself as I am now as a projection of my past into the future moment. That is, to think of my life before my eventual death. There are other ways to think of life, but this is where my mind is. This is how I think of it now. As my grandmother dies and my parents contemplate their own deaths, so too do I contemplate the life I wish to live in light of my own eventual passing.
And in relation to this, I too think of Maia and my choice to not have children. So that when I think of our future in this house, our future in general, it is to think of a future without children, which is, in a way, a future without a future. But that is exactly why I would be disinclined to have children. I don't wish to have children as an investment that pays dividends. I don't want to create lives that are dependent on me so that I may someday be dependent on them. I don't want to invest my life in that.
Truthfully, I'll take my life before I become too dependent, before my life is too far removed from what I wish it to be, honestly.
And so, I laugh in thinking about this new house and this new future in light of all these thoughts of death and children and my eventual suicide. It seems a bit much, I know, but it's how I think about it: all at once, with honest trust.