Flashbacks of the Future

It’s 8:30pm and I’ve just showered and put away my clothes. A year ago, I had to lie down after completing both of these activities. Less than a year ago, I had to take breaks whilst doing the latter. Fold the pants, lie down on the floor. Hang up the shirts, then back to the floor. Today I did both of these things, without surges of fatigue and weakness.

Healing takes time, but it is possible.

At times, I focus so intently on moving forward that I don’t let myself stop and reflect on the past. The act of reflection still feels risky, as if too much thought will teleport me back into those treacherous days. A part of me still feels skeptical about whether the progress I’ve made will last, but it’s not foolish, wishful thinking to say I’m doing much better these days. Even if saying so still feels like a hopeful aspiration, it is not premature, exaggerating, or anything close to a fib. 

I’m still learning how to finally settle into this truth. 

But as it turns out, I’m still really angry about what it took to get here. To get back to the place where I can hang up clothes and take a shower without exhausting myself. It took over a year of physical therapy, of dedicating and centralizing my life around a rehabilitation program. It took drastic changes in my diet, cutting out gluten, processed sugar, peanuts, fermented products, most dairy, basically a whole lot of food that makes life worth living. It took over a year of gastric distress, finding out what works and more disappointingly, what doesn’t.

It took one year of trying and failing, one year of the tiniest baby steps. It took one year of hoping, and not being able to stomach my numerous doubts. Before all this, it took two years of unexplained symptoms and a year and half of medical trauma. In total, it took three years of feeling unwell, every day of my young adult life.

It took too much to get here, and yet somehow, I still feel grateful.

I wonder how long my fury and gratitude will be able to coexist. When it comes to my health, I can’t seem to feel gratitude these days without also feeling eclipsing rage. The two are wrapped up against each other, tangled like a knotted necklace that only exasperates me.

I wonder if they’ll ever untangle or if they’re now forever intertwined. I’m hoping for the former, but I guess I’ll have to get back to you on that.

While it devastates me, all it took to get here, part of me feels a sense of pride. I fought like hell to rebuild my life, brick by brick, hour by hour. It’s worth mentioning I didn’t do it alone, that I couldn’t do it alone, and am privileged to have the resources I did. It takes a village to cope with chronic illness, and I thank every family member of mine, every friend who ever checked in on me, and every doctor, physical therapist, dietician, psychotherapist, and health professional that contributed to my care.

Yet in all transparency, the monotony of my current reality frequently frustrates and underwhelms me. While I’m ecstatic to be physically able to put away my clothes again, I feel discouraged about being cooped up inside, isolated within the same scenery I was in whilst being housebound over a year ago. I wish I were spending these days of better health going out with my friends, studying on campus, making the memories I missed out on, rather than continuing to stay cooped inside the same house my illness confined me to a year ago.

Yesterday morning I woke up to the news of a possible, serious gas leak. I was instructed not to use any appliances and was warned that even simply flipping on a light switch could be enough to prompt an explosion. (No biggie.) With the stealth of a ninja, muttering on repeat, “I will not turn on a light switch, I will not turn on a light switch,” I collected my things and adventured to my grandparents’ house, who conveniently live next door.

Double-masked and bundled up, looking around my grandparents’ living room, it occurred to me it’s been nearly a year since I last stepped foot in their home. Obviously, this wasn’t an ideal situation, as they haven’t yet had their second vaccine and I hadn’t completed a full, proper 14 day quarantine, but despite my nervousness, I was elated to see them nonetheless, and get out of the house for a change.

In one of my current classes at school, we recently read Story of Your Life, which is a short story by Ted Chiang, a popular science fiction writer. This story later went on to inspire the movie Arrival, and it deals with 2 concepts of awareness: simultaneous consciousness and sequential consciousness. I’ll try to spare you from all the elaborate, complicated details, but essentially, sequential consciousness is how us humans perceive our lives: one event follows the other and the future is always unknown. With simultaneous consciousness however, the past, present, and future are experienced all at once, so the future is not only predetermined, but it’s explicitly known ahead of time.

Obviously, it’s unlikely I will develop simultaneous consciousness in this lifetime and I am unfortunately doomed to live out my days with complete ignorance of the future. But every now and then, I swear I’m in that short story, getting glimpses of the future, of memories I’ve not yet made but will make, in time. They’re almost like visions (dramatic word choice, but let me live..) and in every one of them, I can see myself happy, surrounded by people again.

I had one of these “visions” while at my grandparents’ yesterday, and it filled me with hope that one day, my isolation will end. Sitting at their kitchen table, in the same place I have throughout my childhood, I experienced what can only be called ‘flashbacks of the future.’ I saw myself hugging friends, without masks, our smiles visible. I saw myself finally reuniting with family, embracing without hesitation.

It won’t be much longer until I am spending afternoons with my grandparents again, and when I do, it won’t be only when emergency strikes (spoiler: there was no gas leak). It won’t be much longer until I am seated at a restaurant table, laughing and dining with friends, or until I can travel and visit loved ones, until I am immersed in life again.

“It won’t be long now,” I say to myself over and over, until I run out of breath. It’s so close, I can feel it, and I swear I can see it too.

Say what you want, call it imagination or complete delusion, but I got a glimpse of the future yesterday, and it was beautiful, and real.