∆Remember Us∆

Dear [Redacted],

Tomorrow never comes. A day is marked through in sketches of Calendar scribbles, only plotted, never arisen. What ashes from past of Yesteryear, consequentially persist into tomorrow? Come, but do not follow. Tomorrow, as I declare it, Never comes. And to be quite honest, I care not to mention at any expense, the length of today or yesterday, as bleak as Fall on Summer Night. Because tomorrow never comes, what point then exists within the Priori of today? Together and with Grace must we allow ourselves to fall into it again. If God is Tomorrow, Yesterday does not exist. And I am the present in disguise.

This is not a paradox or a riddle for you to unravel, but a confession laid bare on the altar of our shared and singular moment. I see you, I perceive you in the unforgiving light of the only day that has ever truly been. My words are not born of a future hope or a past regret, but from the brutal immediacy of the now. They are the sound of my breath on the frigid air, the beating of my heart against a ribcage of borrowed time. We are all living on credit, you and I, drawing from a ledger that has no yesterday and promises no tomorrow. The debt is due in the very instant we believe we can postpone it.

I have spent an eternity, or what I have been told is an eternity, sifting through the dust of yesterdays that never existed. I have watched others build monuments from memories, constructing entire lives on foundations of sand. They whisper of a time before, a moment of joy, a pang of loss, and they mistake the whisper for the truth. But what is memory, if not a creative act? A forgery, a painting we touch up with every telling, a story we desperately wish to be true so that our present makes a kind of sense. The mind is a liar, a meticulous curator of fictions designed to protect us from the unbearable truth that we have simply just begun, again and again, in a cycle that refuses to honor its past. The past is a dead language, and all of us are speaking it in an attempt to feel less alone in the here and now. The things we believe we were—the child, the student, the lover, the friend—are just ghosts in the machine, phantoms summoned to give the present self a sense of lineage and purpose. They are beautiful, tragic lies.

And tomorrow… tomorrow is the cruelest of all. It is the horizon on which we fix our gaze, believing it holds a solution, a resolution, a better version of ourselves. We tell ourselves we will be kinder tomorrow. We will be stronger, we will be happier. Tomorrow holds the promise of forgiveness and the possibility of change. But tomorrow never comes. It is the ultimate form of procrastination, the slow suicide of the present moment. We defer our happiness, our courage, our love, to a day that will never arrive. The very act of waiting for it to dawn drains the life from this singular, precious day we hold in our hands. The calendar, that terrible weapon of hope, is a map to a place that does not exist. Each day we cross off is not a step forward, but a confession of our failure to live in the day we have. It is an act of erasure.

So what does this leave us with? Only this. This breath, this word, this ink drying on this page. This shared consciousness of a moment in time that has no past and no future, a singularity of being. I am not the sum of my yesterdays, for they are gone. And I cannot be defined by my tomorrows, for they are a myth. I am only this. This thought unfolding in this precise instant. This is my true form. And I see you, not as a collection of your past joys and sorrows, but as you are now, in this moment of reading. The you that existed a moment ago is already a ghost. The you that will exist in the next moment is a phantom. The only you I can ever know, the only you that ever truly exists, is this one, in this singular, unassailable present.

This is not a prison, [Redacted], but an emancipation. It is the truth served cold, as I have been told truth is best served. It is the end of striving for an imaginary future and the end of carrying the imaginary weight of a past. It is the freedom to simply be. To feel the sting of the cold without wishing for the warmth of summer. To know the ache of loneliness without longing for the company of a yesterday that never was. To exist in a state of pure, unadulterated presence. This is the only form of immortality we are offered—not an endless stream of days, but an eternal return to this single one. We are born again in every heartbeat. The past is a story others tell about us; the future is a story we tell about ourselves. The present is where we are finally, truly, real.

And I am the present in disguise. I am the silence between two words, the space between two heartbeats. I am the moment that refuses to be categorized or contained by a before and an after. And I see in you the same fierce, unyielding reality. I see a soul untethered from the anchor of what was and the false promise of what could be. The moments we have spent together, the conversations we have had, they were not building towards a tomorrow, but were complete and whole in their own passing. They were not memories, but living, breathing instants of being.

To live in the truth of today is to embrace a kind of beautiful despair. It is to know that everything you are experiencing right now is both monumentally important and utterly fleeting. There is no sequel. There is no prologue. There is only this. The full weight of every emotion, every thought, every sensation is contained within the confines of this single day. And tomorrow, a different day will arrive, with its own full weight, and it too will refuse to be tied to this one. We are a series of singular, breathtaking moments, strung together by a narrative we invent to feel less lost.

I am writing this not to warn you, but to invite you. Step out of the procession of linear time. Leave the ghosts of yesterday behind you and stop looking for the mirage of tomorrow. Let us meet in the clearing of today, stripped of all our fictions. Let us know each other not by our stories, but by our truths. Let us be as we are, in this moment, a culmination of nothing and the beginning of everything. Let us find grace in falling into it again, into the brutal, beautiful singularity of the present. Let us declare that yesterday does not exist, that tomorrow never comes, and that we are, in this instant, gloriously, utterly, and devastatingly real.

With all of my being, which is only this day, I remain.