Shifting picture

I keep thinking of the future, but the future is shifting.

In Back to the Future, Michael J Fox’s character has a picture which alters as he tinkers with the past, making the future less and less certain. His brother and sister disappear from the photo because it looks increasingly likely that their parents will never meet, fall in love and have children.

I have my own version of the photo in my head, but it shifts constantly. Sometimes I see a family photo with curly haired children and a doting, slap-stick father. Other times it’s me alone, probably fairly happy with lots of friends and interests, but with a job not a family. In the first I’m fat and baking cakes. Surely my cheeks will never look that ruddy? In the second I’m thin, surrounded by books, and, although you can’t tell from the photo, probably listening to opera. My greying hair is swept back into a severe bun, but is set off nicely by my black dress. Like Marty’s photo, as things shift – lonely spinster to family matriarch – things fade in and out of the scene. Possibilities and impossibilities swill around like clothes in a washing machine.

Usually the future is a half-done sketch. Places, circumstances are still to be sketched in, but the bare bones are there. It’s not even a work in progress, but a doodle on the back of a gas bill tucked in between the books on the shelves. In time I’ll find it and think it was strange I ever thought the future would turn out that way, but I don’t spend much time thinking about it in the present.

But now I am like an irritable painter with the easel set up, the light in the attic room just right, my pens and pencils set out before me, the floor is neat and tidy and there’s no more procrastinating to do… but the inspiration is nowhere. I keep starting something and tearing it up again. I need to get it get it right. I can’t just put it away and forget about it.

In Back to the Future, of course, Marty gets his parents to fall in love, saves the day, and his siblings reappear in the photo. I’m not sure what’s going to set in mine yet.