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Future Tense

2 min readMar 26, 2020

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Willard, New Mexico. ©Oriana Schwindt, 2017

There is a great sucking hole in my chest. The present has trapped us all; the future tense has disappeared, and with it all sense of possibility.

To be depressed is to experience a flattening of time. The present is an eternal moment, unbearable as such, flat and grey and stretching out as far as you can see. The future simply doesn’t exist. The past is there, in the early stages, ready to enfold you with memories of past misdeeds, but in deepest despair all that really exists is the endless present. The future requires some measure of hope, even if it is only the hope that this moment will end.

There is no future tense in the world, not right now. You are not “going” to. You “will” not. There is no telling when we will be able to will, to go.

I am having a hard time with this.

You would think I would be used to a future-less world, language, mindset. For a rather large chunk of my life, I thought more about its end than its continuance. But I had promised myself a while back that I would stop doing that. I would do the work, and become someone who could see a future for herself. I was really doing it, too!

It’s all gone, now.

There are people now attempting to force the future back into our world, and it feels not simply inorganic or ignorant but outright obscene. The virus has eradicated…

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Oriana Schwindt
Oriana Schwindt

Written by Oriana Schwindt

Freelance journalist. No fixed abode.