DISPATCH FROM THE FUTURE: NOTE TO MY 2017 SELF - Essay

conclusion from the memoir “THE CORPSE DIARIES”

by Elizabeth Abed

Let’s start with the worst part: For many years, it will be bad and bad and worse and absolutely nothing will work, and you will want to die, but you will not. Every day you will just keep not dying, so you will try different things, things that might make you suffer less.

You will try intensive meditation.

You will try several types of medication. Vitamins. Supplements.

You will try clean eating and intermittent fasting.

You will forest bathe, but only once.

You will try cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, chromotherapy, listening to Dharma talks.

You will eat medical marijuana, drink it, CBD, patches, drops, vapes, smokes, shatter, rabbit hole disaster.

Every night you will do your theta waves, alpha waves, spirit guide journeys, lucid dreaming, guided hypnosis, positive affirmations, and ASMR (deep personal attention).

You will be up for trying neurolinguistic programming, until somebody tells you it’s weak science.

You will carry a green oval stone in your pocket, and you will name it Judah.

You will wear a bracelet made of lava stones that emit lavender essence.

You will try hospitals. More hospitals. More hospitals. Or maybe, more appropriately said, they will try you.

You will move to a beautiful apartment, French doors, little wild yard, near all your loving family.

In 2018, you will qualify for government disability, and you will be nominated for an Emmy.

It’s not the American dream, and it’s not the story anybody wants to hear: Sometimes, no matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you’re fucked. You just can’t fix things. Not the way you want to.

Starting in late 2019, there will be a strange viral “outbreak.” By March 2020, this outbreak will be called a “pandemic.”

People will die, first hundreds a day, then thousands, and you will start to come alive.

You will feel guilty that, for the first time in years, you feel something like excitement. Something electric and charged and urgent. You will imagine that this feels like cutting feels. A relief from all-consuming pressure. A relief to feel something, even if it might kill you.

You will watch people argue about whether this–whatever “this” is–is actually real. It could be a hoax, it could be a bad flu. You will not even want to argue. More and more, reality will not seem to matter.

At the start of the outbreak, you will have separated from your family. It will be just you, in the woods, with spotty Internet, a hotspot, a laptop you watch all day, the death count numbers on the screen, ticking up by the hour.

You will have rented an apartment from a conspiracy theorist/Nazi sympathizer who has stockpiled enough food for a year. Spam and soup and rice and beans and oats and powdered milk. He will flee for Mexico where he believes he will be safe from “this thing, whatever it is.”

You will order one face mask to be delivered, and you will try it on in case you need to leave the house. But you will not leave the house.

Eating applesauce out of a paper bowl, you will watch a field hospital being built in Central Park. You will watch bodies hauled into refrigerated morgue trucks.

Scientists will work around the clock to develop a vaccine, which could take months, even years. Retired doctors and nurses will return to work, even though they will be at risk of dying. They will gear up each day in full protective gear—gowns, goggles, masks, face shields. They will treat the people who can be treated. They will sit for a while with the people who cannot.

You will still be just a poet. You will feel guilty about this, but there will be no way to change it. It would take years to become a doctor or a scientist. And anyway, most schools are closed.

More than your useless degree, you will feel guilty that you are starting to feel much better. Better than you have in years. You will consider it a type of survivor’s guilt. Although, of course, there’s no guarantee you’ll survive. Anything could happen. You may eat a piece of poisoned fruit.

You will continue to feel a call to do something. You will open your eyes each morning, and instead of immediately saying, “Oh god, no,” you will say nothing. Nothing will be a small victory.

You truly are a one-trick pony, so you will put out a call on social media:

I’m writing poems through the month of April. Give me a topic. I’ll try to write you a poem. Xo.

The topics will rush in from family, friends, and strangers. Trust. Perseverance. A Future without Hugs. Love. Isolation. Heart. Hope.

These topics will give you feelings of warmth. People are good, and they are suffering. People are sick, from no fault of their own, and they cannot get well. They cannot go to church. They cannot go to school. They cannot go to work. They get poor and then poorer. They drink because they are worried and alone, then drink more because they’re worried about their drinking. There are no parties anymore, no celebrations. The future looks like gray static. The channel has changed, possibly permanently.

Your channel changed in 2017 when you perceived your entire life as having shifted into one gray strip of static. One limitless limbo of suffering. You secretly called it “Middlewretch.” But with this new plague, you have improbably shifted out of Middlewretch, left your corpse behind you, and now you are writing poems for people.

You will find a therapist, and his name will be Ben, and he will be a Buddhist, and he will acknowledge how much you have suffered, and he will remind you that although you are suffering less each day, you will suffer in the future. You are alive, and suffering is the price of living.

You will confide in Ben that as everyone is sick and dying, you are becoming better, you are coming alive, rising from the dead, and although it might make you a terrible person, hey: misery loves company.

Ben will tell you that misery does love company. And more importantly, misery needs company. When people are miserable, they need connection, people who empathize with them, people who listen and allow them to be heard, to be blameless.

Some quick housekeeping:

You will publish your first book called American Empathy. It will be a collection of the poems you wrote by request during the early days of the “viral outbreak,” as it was called then.

You will start to build an online cultural center for the Syrian-Lebanese community you grew up with in your hometown, many of them members of Sacred Heart Church.

This will feel especially significant because, at your lowest point, your absolute rock-bottom, you will strip off all of your clothes, and slip into the night, trying to find Sacred Heart. You are convinced if you can find it, if you can reach it, you will be safe, you will be healed. It is your sacred refuge. You will walk and walk and at first you will feel confident and happy, but as time goes on, you will get colder and colder and more and more lost, and you will start to realize you will never find it, it’s hopeless, and then you black out. After that, something happens. Somebody saves you. But you don’t know who and you don’t know how.

You will be married 20 years on June 15, 2022. After a six-month break, you are living together again. You leave the ring off your finger, but still feel for it several times a day. You decide you will take his last name for your twentieth-year anniversary. Your wedding vows were a fragment of one sentence: things grievous, bitter, but know I will love

You will never end on an unhappy note. This will be your one rule, and you will stick to it. Which is why this book will take you many years to finish.

“What is a happy note?” Ben will ask. “Notes flow into each other. It’s the only thing we can predict. Change from one second to the next.”

And of course, that’s true. Cells will shed. Eventually, you will become a corpse. What happens after that, nobody knows.  Even a fortune-teller can’t see the future of the future.

So you take a leap of faith. Die every moment. It’s like a poem. It has a story, but if asked to explain it, you couldn’t. It would slip away, like the best dream of your life, seconds before waking.