Back in fifty.

Do you wonder sometimes? How is it all going to be in fifty years time. Look at how you live now, at every detail. Try and take a good snapshot of it so that even in fifty years you can remember today. With luck I’ll still be alive in fifty years and I’ll be eighty. I will have lived close to three times what I’ve lived so far. I’ll be an old woman, I will have lost many loved ones, I’ll struggle with my body to get it to respond. People around will find it hard to believe I have ever been a young woman. My skin will be wrinkled, I’ll look at my hands and see my veins through. So blue under my skin, so thin. It is stretchy today, even though my eyelids are a lot softer than they used to be. There’s a chance I’ll be very much the same person. Wiser hopefully, but probably speaking the same way. Using words already old fashioned now but which used to be youngster slang ten years ago. And everyday I guess, I’ll find hard to believe I’m not forty anymore.

As I’ll read these fifty years old lines I’ll try to remember this very moment. Jb’s having a shower, I’m in the study, we’ve just been watching source code on the projector. The light is on in the corridor to my left. Dark clothes are hanging all over the room. They should be dry by now and they’re waiting to be folded and back to their cupboard. Soon we’ll leave this flat. It’s too damp, too small. Everything gets moldy, even clothes in the cupboard sometimes for god’s sake. Those clothes are probably quite happy just hanging there, actually. It’s Sunday evening and I’m writing for tomorrow.Tomorrow morning I’ll be back at work, making effects in the unreal engine. In fifty years I’ll be retired. What will I do all day long? Now I’m always complaining about time, about all the things I want to make but never find the time for. Will I be making those things as an old lady? Will I have managed to be a writer, an artist? I will probably have children then, possibly even grandchildren. I need to make bread for tomorrow morning. I got some drawing done this weekend, but I still haven’t sorted my old computer. My first computer, the ten years old one I bought with my first salary. We’ve cooked a fine porc Wellington, with sage, bacon and prunes today. One of Jb’s mum recipe. Oh, match of the day now? I had no idea that film was so long.

Hey old lady, do you remember all of that? Well you’re bound to now, as I‘m describing it. Sorry that’s a bit intimate, this conversation between you and me that I’m making public. I didn’t mean it you know, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. It just happened. I kinda pictured you to start with and you’re the one who made me drift away. I hope you can read me, I hope I haven’t forgotten the English language. Today I can marvel at German words I’ve written with that very hand twelve years ago which I simply can’t understand anymore. ‘Noch dazu bezeichnet er sich höher als, deshalb denkt er den Menschen an Sarah jämmerlich’. Yeah, right. If you say so. (That’s most likely not grammatically correct by the way.) I’m hoping so much this won’t happen to my English. I wanted to talk about the world, not about me and certainly not to you. But… I don’t know. Alone in this small room… it makes you navel-gaze a bit I suppose. Had I been in the open, out in a garden with a clear sky above my head, it would have all been different. I would have followed my original intention and focused on the big everything, not on me. Let’s get back to it shall we?

Do you wonder sometimes? How is it all going to be in fifty years time. Everything has changed so much since the sixties. In fifty years, we’ll be in the sixties. For our children, the twenties will be old times for sure, but not the one we would mean. Our twenties will be the nineteen-twenties. The old century. The first world war will be just as vague and confused to them as the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 is to us now. Well to us French people. I bet most of you Brits haven’t even heard of it. Most of the French haven’t either to be fair. While we’re at it. Wars. These days Israel and Palestine are bombing each other again. Again and endlessly. This fight is more than fifty years old already. Will they have found a common ground then? What about north Korea? We know just so little about what’s happening there. What about all the arabic countries fighting their way to freedom? Will they have managed to maintain it, to secure stability and build peaceful nations? What about all the suffering countries I don’t even know the name of? Will Europe be a federal nation and us oldies the last remembrance of old fashioned nationalism then? Or will it have collapsed with each nation withdrawing into itself and glancing sidelong at its neighbours?  What energy will we run on? What will information be like? We’ll be the ones who lived before the internet. Just how our grandparents used to not have cars or even running water in some cases. Will we be lost in a world running at a different pace, based on paradigms we won’t get? It might also end up just being the same old thing, slowing evolving but all in all dragging along for fifty years to remain quite the same after all.

Anyway. However the world around, I hope I haven’t messed it up for you old lady. Take care.