<fiction> <\fiction>

So I have this friend who can see the future. I mean, I’m not sure I exactly believe that he can see the future, but he claims he can, and well… sometimes you want to believe that you have such a friend and so you suspend a little disbelief. My friend, he doesn’t tell me the future in a straightforward kind of way; he never says, “the Yankees are going to win the Series this year and make sure you have band-aids in your purse; you’re going to cut your knee getting out of the car this afternoon.” It’s just that sometimes I’ll bemoan the state of things as they are, and he’ll subtly allude to how they’re eventually going to be instead, but not in a “everything’s going to be fine” way. It’s always something more like, “Don’t beat yourself up so much about not being fluent yet. You’ll catch up in no time when you move to Brazil with your husband.” This, when I have neither plans to move to Brazil nor even a boyfriend… but apparently he can see the future, and in the future I have both.

In the future, I’m also apparently going to write and publish a few novels. Maybe all my friend’s predictions are self-fulfilling and I’m only going to do the things he says because he has said them. This feels to me how it’s likely to go with the writing; I don’t believe I’d ever have tried writing this without benefit of his prophecy, but here I am writing this, so who knows. If you’re reading it, them maybe he was right all along and maybe his saying it made it so. If it is the case that things happen to me, or that I make things happen, simply because he has told me they would be so, I sure wish he’d tell me I’m going to lose twenty pounds this year. Hell, I wish he’d tell me I’m going to lose twenty pounds this month.