If you could see into the future, what would be the most interesting thing you could see?

It’s not a question I’d ever asked myself before, not because of the future bit, that’s easy, I’d just never thought about it, until that moment. The answer was something you couldn’t see. There was something I couldn’t see, or rather someone. I was sitting in the pub, like usual, having a drink, like usual. I saw a girl come in the door, pretty much like usual. Then she disappeared. That wasn’t usual. That got my attention.

I replayed the scene, there she was a step in front of where she was before, but she wasn’t coming in the door anymore. When I looked to where she was going, she wasn’t there.

I gather I don’t see things like most people do. As best I can tell, most people only see the present, not the future and not the past so well either. That seems weird to me, how do you not see the future, you just focus and you can see it, not remarkable. Most people seem hung up on the present, that was really confusing when I was young. It’s not like the present is particularly remarkable, why would you worry about it so much.

I’m pretty sure the present is where the future turns into the past. That’s the impression I get, it’s a difficult place to pin down. As the future is becoming the past it becomes increasingly difficult to change and becomes more focussed. You can only make smaller and smaller changes to it until it becomes fixed. I’m pretty sure the fixed bit of existence is “the past” as it’s called, and the changeable bit is “the future”. The changeability is how I can tell the difference between the future and the past, that makes sense.

I get the impression that most people can only see the past increasingly dimly, that makes sense. They can’t see the future at all, that’s weird. I can see the future increasingly dimly, all the possibilities, unfocused. Everything’s pretty clear for minutes, maybe hours, I can get rough impressions for longer, maybe days, any further than that, I have to concentrate hard to see anything and I’ll probably get a headache.

Then they seem to see the present so clearly, and only the present clearly. Things are clearest near this mythical point, but it doesn’t seem as important as people make out. But now I was seeing this girl, but only somewhere near the present. I couldn’t see her past, and I couldn’t see her future. When I looked, everything else was as it was, but she wasn’t there. Maybe if I looked closely I could see where she wasn’t. There was a void that people moved around.

I tried to find her again, she’d snap into focus, then disappear. She did seem to exist somewhere near the present, but I was none to sure where the present was exactly, so I didn’t know that that was where she actually was. I concentrated on seeing her, in whatever moment she actually exited in. It was hard work. I’d never tried to follow one point in time before, I’d never had a reason to. I’d keep losing her, and then have to look backwards and forwards until she blinked into existence briefly again, then try to find that exact point again. It was exhausting and it was giving me a headache, a pretty novel experience in itself. I didn’t usually bother doing things which would result in a headache.

I was concentrating so hard on seeing her, I wasn’t actually noticing what she was doing. So when she snapped at me, “What are you staring at?” I hadn’t noticed she was looking at me, and had walked up to me.

“You have no future.” Was my unguarded answer. Usually I don’t speak “off the cuff”, so to speak. I’ll have rehearsed what I’m going to say, seen the result and made changes as necessary. Words are a powerful way to affect the future, I use them wisely. Without being able to see her, I hadn’t known what I was going to say, or what the reaction was going to be.

In this case the reaction seemed to be puzzlement, “Are you high?”

“No, confused.” I managed another off the cuff remark. I could only manage to say exactly what I was feeling, I couldn’t say something guarded, it was too much work to be with her and think about what I wanted to say.

She looked a little concerned, “What’s the matter?”

“I can’t see your future.”

“You can usually see people’s future, can you?”

She didn’t sound impressed. A demonstration seemed like a good idea, but that would mean I’d lose sight of her. I hoped I could find her again. I saw what I needed and looked for her again, I found her, half turned away from me. I’d never revealed this about myself to anyone. No one else seemed to be able to do this, so it seemed like a good idea to not mention it, usually. This was anything but usual.

I spoke, “Yes, that guy is going to order a rum and coke, that guy will order a pint of Strongbow, and some pork scratchings, no make that a pint of snakebite. That guy will win the jackpot on that machine in five minutes.” I indicated three of the patrons of the pub around us. I’d had my eye on the slot machine, it was going to pay out big soon. That was usually the way to fund an evening in the pub, put a pound in the machine at the right time. No one else seemed to know when the right time was though. I’d stopped intending to win it and I saw the other guy win it instead, and saw the time it happened.

She looked startled and stopped turning as a voice form behind her said, “A rum and coke, please.”

Then, “A pint of Strongbow, and some pork scratchings. … No make that a pint of snakebite.”

“How did you do that?” She asked. I didn’t know, I needed some time to think. That in itself was a novelty, I usually have as much time as I want. Another thing I’d noticed about most people, they didn’t seem to perceive the present in a uniform manner, ‘time flies when you’re having fun’. If I’m having fun, I’ll linger in that time, and replay the good bits. You may have heard the joke, ‘Time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana’, personally I think time flies more like the banana, not particularly straight, and somewhat wobbly. Which makes me wonder if the time flies really like snacking on the arrows or the banana.

People will also complain of time dragging on when they don’t want it to, if I don’t want it to, I’ll just gloss over that bit and not worry about it. Now that I’d stuck myself in the girl’s present, I couldn’t do that. “Let me buy you a drink and I’ll tell you about it.” That should buy me some time, that’s what you do in a pub. This working time in a linear manner was exhausting. Usually I started with the result and worked backwards from that. Like the day before, another pub, I’d looked around to find a good future. I found a good one, about two hours away. I was looking down at a well fucked girl, she said, “You were amazing.”

I teased out that thread and found where it got to me. In five minutes, I’d walk up to the girl and tell her, “Pizza is my second favourite thing to eat in bed.” I groaned inwardly, that was a corny line. Some really corny lines did actually work, at least some of the time. I could try them out and see what happens, without suffering scorn if the girl didn’t bite. Someone once told me that, “Nice shoes, lets fuck” was an effective line, sometimes. I spent an evening in a disco trying it out, in theory. Of three hundred girls, I’d have got lucky three times, and got slapped 23 times. In actuality I really tried it on the third girl, and did get lucky.

Yesterday, the pizza line worked, I chatted to the girl, I’m not really sure about what. I don’t take much notice of that, I just follow the script. It’s like I’m playing the part of me, and not taking any notice. It’s me ending up where I wanted to be that’s important. I think this one liked me boasting about how I could satisfy her. It might have well been one where I was the perfect listener, understanding her inner feelings, I’d have taken just as much notice. Come to think of it, I hardly remember anything about the girl. She was a girl, unremarkable. Without going back and looking I couldn’t give you a description. That probably means she was unremarkable in most ways. She was a girl, that’s all that was important, the outcome, that I scored, was important.

Every time I did something to make the desired outcome more certain, it’d become clearer, more focussed.