How the Future Deals with XX

XX is not prepared for the future. She does not fail to engage with the oncoming due to indifference, ingrained fatalism, or a preference for surprise; she does not resist preparation on heroic, radical principle. Nothing about her predicament reflects choice. To her despair, her chagrin, her shame, XX is simply incapable of presupposing, pre-accessing, or pre-strategizing about what will inevitably befall her, infecting her days and nights, inhabiting her mind and organs, consuming her senses, depleting her emotions.

This is the conversation taking place in the head of XX:

I can’t…

You should.

But I don’t…

You must.

How?

(Static.)

It is a conversation XX has been having with herself for a very long time, for as long as (longer than?) she can remember, a conversation that does not change in its wording, pace, tone, frequency, or intensity, thus qualifying as a species of hell.

XX’s day begins… No? You have no interest in her morning miasma and self-reproach menu, first light? Fine. Fine, fine, fine, fine, fine.

The consciousness of certain persons, including XX—and now, seemingly yourself—confines itself to whatever is already tumultuously there. Floating about: the theory that such persons are not only socially deficient but a menace to the herd. Also in the mix are more extreme, more fervent, more righteous opinions. Recently popular is a conviction that no one should be shielded from anything. How one holds up to (and under) bombardment separates the underachievers from the elect, the blundering from the competent, the amateur from the professional.

Theories wax and wane.

XX’s predicament persists.

Only child XX lacked a sibling example. Another drawback: in her extrafamilial dealings, she rarely mingled with her kind (other children). Tempting though it may be to blame the parents for this error in oversight (parents, having bred, reflexively think and plan for the future), the reality remains: XX missed out on peer-to-peer maturity training. In the early on, she failed to witness friends riding tricycles across rough gravel and tipping over, or riding their tricycles on and on across rough gravel, exhilarated and unhurt, or falling over, getting up and resuming, or ditching the tricycle altogether, suddenly, supremely, bored. All these demonstrable lessons in multiple outcomes, the future recast as the birthplace of divergent opportunities, were not within XX’s grasp, memory bank, or character construct. Result: an unprepared XX moved from childhood to adolescence to late adolescence to young adulthood to later adulthood to where she now uneasily exists.

Your snarling lips.

Noted.

Why solicit pity for this one-problem being, a problem confined to the realm of the mind and (at this juncture) uncoupled with gangrene, cancer, baldness, blindness, suppurating rashes, torn ligaments, being too close to the door when a gunman, armed for the apocalypse, enters to shoot as many strangers in as many minutes as possible. Many, many, many suffer much, much, much worse.

Undeniably true.

XX’s problems are not manifold and escalating; her problem is singular and constant. She lives helplessly afraid of what has not yet occurred, a flaw in her mechanism about which the future gives not a shit.