fuck me / marry me / kill me

a letter to the women of my future

i have spent most of the last decade assuming, rightly or wrongly, sanely or insanely, that none of us will live to see our grandchildren. ever since i saw alphago’s pitiless eyes as it mercilessly choked out lee sedol on live television in 2016 i have assumed that the inexorable logic of technological progress will, one way or another, consume our entire future unless some miraculous effort is made to avert it.

consequently i have worked to become the sort of person through which miracles can be born. and a birth requires two parents.

i have learned many things about myself along the way. i have learned that i am ignorant, prideful, clumsy, jealous, easily hurt, easily distracted. i have been humbled before god by my weakness and my sins. i don’t want to deceive you. if our love is to be built on anything it can only be the truth. once i was told, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, and those who said it did not understand what those words really meant, but i am arrogant enough to believe that i do. i want you to destroy what is untrue in me.

what is it going to be like to kiss you for the first time, after talking for ten uninterrupted hours, high on the mutual pleasure of being understood? the tenth time, after a night spent singing snatches of our favorite songs to each other? the hundredth time, that same night, each kiss hungrier and more playful than the last? what dances will we dance at our wedding? what books will we offer our children for them to treasure? will we raise them in the city, the suburbs, on the farm, in the wilderness? what will it be like for them to grow up in this brave new world, where the drums of war beat loud and the computers are coming to life? will any of us survive this?

i wish i could offer you certainty. i wish i could tell you i know how this is going to play out, that i know what to do, i wish i could hold you close and tell you i’ll make everything okay and mean it. but i have learned that certainty is an illusion and in the wreckage of certainty all i have are my questions, when i hold you all i can offer you is the sound of my beating heart. will it be enough for you?

i want you to understand how much i admire you, your strength, your grace, your humor, your yearning, how much the divine fire in you inspires me and gives me hope that a better future is possible. i want to make art with you, i want us to inspire art in each other, any kind, all kinds; music, poems, stories, the art of our bodies in harmony. whether we become friends or colleagues or lovers or husband and wife is not for me to decide, i cannot know the steps of our dance before we dance it. all i can do is play my part and then surrender to the space between us, which is vaster and wiser than either of us. it is in that space that we play our part in ushering in a new world, and then surrender to the yet vaster space surrounding us, the vaster dance.

if you are my wife, if the future is secure, if things go more or less the ordinary way, i will likely die before you. i never was good at taking care of my health. you will bury me and weep at my grave like your foremothers before you and this will be right and proper. count it a blessing that you aren’t burying our children. pray for me. remember me. tell our story. death is also part of the art.

and if the future is not ordinary? if we rock ourselves to sleep in silicon cradles (graves?) or rocket ourselves out to the stars? if we live for centuries, millennia, until heat death? then let us kiss ten thousand times, a million times, let us celebrate anniversaries with our children’s children’s children’s children, let us invent entire genres of music to serenade each other.

but these are distant dreams. here, now, i only want to know: what wants to happen between us? what is waiting to be born?