I like to write, but often writing isn’t easy. There is always a tension between what I want to write and what I actually write. Sometimes I wonder if I am revealing too much and other times I wonder if I am not saying enough. And there are times when phrases like this get stuck in my brain:
“Sitting among the remnants of the future.”
Seriously, that’s been in my brain for the last thirty minutes and I have no idea what it means. Perhaps it is a title of a time travel novel or a poem where the speaker laments.
Perhaps it is prophetic and part of some ancient future – some mythology that has formed around pasta machines.
It feels like there should be something profound in the phrase, but it could also be just plain silly. Perhaps it’s a chapter in a post apocalyptic book when the hero finally discovers a ruined shell of a 21st century data center and realizes that no one will ever be able to restart it and recover the vast secrets it holds.
Perhaps, it’s a pen and ink drawing – a spaceship crashed on an alien landscape with a space suited figure collapsed against a rock looking back at the wreckage that has stranded her light years from home.
Or maybe it could be a novel about a man born in the 1950’s told flash backs weaving the story of his life around cause and effect – telling how that choice to drive to the lake became his greatest joy and deepest regret.
“Sitting among the remnants of the future”
“Sitting” implying no movement and being introspective.
“among” More than one thing – in the midst of lots of things. Objects, memories.
“the remnants” Tattered and dusty. Broken and discarded. Incomplete and fragmented.
“of the future” a juxtaposition where past and future merge then fade.
Or it is just a lament of an old man who never achieved all he set out to do?
A writer can never be sure why some words come to disturb the mind and take the story to places he hadn’t intended.
Peace,
Andrew
