No one prepares you for the future suddenly slamming into the present. 

I am sitting at the front of a room spilling over with family and friends, in white, holding flowers, my heart pounding.

My brain is vibrating in my skull as I catch up with people who have flown across the world to be here.

A friend warns me that the day will move fast; “take in as much as you can.”

Everyone dances in a dark and low-ceilinged room while the DJ mixes my favorite music. He plays a song or two that only I know, that everyone else is swept along into.

///

Two weeks later, and still—I am not prepared for the future colliding again with the present.

We are all crying in the parking lot of a big-box outdoors store. The car is packed full of all of my dear friend’s belongings.

She drives away from Brussels.

On the side of a busy road, I am sobbing in a way that I had forgotten while renting a Lime bike to get home.

The way home is dangerous, the pavement blurred in my vision.

///

It is painful to be a child of time. The best day of my life passes. The day I’ve been dreading appears. The present is an ever-ticking frame, one that I cannot freeze, or protect from the future, or claw back from the past. What I have anticipated finally arrives—and then passes.

How is it possible that the build-up did not better prepare me for either the arrival or the departure?

Declaring my “Summer 2026 Plans” to my friends at Brasserie Verschuren on the weekend of Friendsgiving 2024, raising the bar’s noise level before adding a huge date range into our calendars—

Visiting the café next door for sandwiches and plotting over how we would arrange the garden—

Spending a rainy spring Sunday planning logistics with my housemate over coffee—

Crying around a campfire with my friend on a cold winter night as she recounts her plans to move away—

Far too quickly, her bed has become my bed. The rear rack on her old bike sits on another’s bike.

Far too quickly, my partner and I are back at the venue, cleaning out the last of our things. We have a snack in the garden, the picnic tables still laid out as we had arranged them. Soon enough, they will be rearranged. The house is no longer ours, the day no longer here. My backpacking bag is full of empty wine bottles.

I think of my old readings, on linguistic relativity, Sapir and Whorf, debates on the Hopi language and how it represents time. I think of the past and present united under a single tense, contrasted with the future—“realized” versus “unrealized”. 

As a non-jewelry wearer, I have no ring. I am happy with the choice. Still, I understand why someone would wear one, beyond tradition. A ring is word made metal, a physical intervening of the past in the present that will endure into the future. 

I have my own such manifestations. I wake up beside my “witnessed partner” in bed every morning. We slowly eat a breakfast of soft-boiled eggs and cheese together before heading our separate ways. I read a book from my now far-away friend in the evening, one we will discuss in person in October. My partner and I plant shade-loving perennials in an unloved corner of our garden. In our small ways, we weld together our realized with our unrealized.

Rylan Shewmaker

Rylan Shewmaker (‘21) calls herself a geographer, though none of her degrees substantiate this. After growing up in Texas and studying in Grand Rapids, she moved to Brussels, Belgium, for her master’s degree in urban studies. She still lives in Brussels and works for a housing non-profit. She enjoys audiobooks, bike commuting, sunny days, and learning new things.